India’s AI opportunity lies in applications and scale, not frontier models, says Nvidia MD

India has the potential to position itself as a global centre for intelligence-driven technologies, with Bengaluru emerging as a key hub due to its talent base and application-led innovation ecosystem, according to Nvidia’s Managing Director for South Asia, Vishal Dhupar.

Speaking at the Voice AI – Making the Best Work for India event in Bengaluru on January 28, Dhupar said India’s advantage in artificial intelligence does not lie in competing over frontier AI models but in deploying intelligence at population scale. He was in conversation with Infosys and EkStep co-founder Nandan Nilekani during a fireside chat.

Dhupar, as reported by Moneycontrol, said the global technology landscape is shifting away from simply storing information toward generating actionable intelligence. According to him, intelligence becomes meaningful only when AI applications are embedded into real workflows and operate at scale. “Models or tokens in isolation have limited value unless they are applied within a context that delivers outcomes,” he said.

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He noted that much of the global AI discourse remains focused on the supply side, such as model size or computational power, while India’s opportunity lies on the demand side, where large-scale deployment, affordability, and real-world usage are critical. Delivering intelligence that works at scale and at low cost is where India can differentiate itself, he added.

Dhupar pointed to Bengaluru’s growing ecosystem of technology builders, startups, and AI professionals as a key factor supporting this transition. The city has emerged as India’s largest hub for artificial intelligence talent and now matches established global tech clusters in terms of workforce depth. Recent industry data shows Bengaluru is also the largest technology talent market in the Asia-Pacific region, with over a million tech professionals.

As more AI-driven applications are built and adopted across sectors, Dhupar said the learning cycle accelerates, creating a reinforcing loop that attracts further innovation and global interest.

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Nilekani said India’s experience in building digital infrastructure at population scale provides a strong foundation for the next phase of AI adoption. Platforms such as Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which operate at low cost and high volumes, demonstrate India’s ability to deploy complex technology systems widely and reliably.

He added that voice-based artificial intelligence could play a critical role in expanding access to technology in a linguistically diverse country like India. According to Nilekani, voice AI represents an important step toward making digital services more inclusive by lowering barriers for users across different languages and literacy levels.