PM calls for promoting affordable, inclusive AI | India News

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi met 12 leading Indian AI startups on Thursday, where he called for promoting affordable and inclusive AI along with frugal innovation, while suggesting that a unique AI model should be presented to the world that reflected the spirit of ‘Made in India, Made for the World’. During the interaction ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in Feb, PM emphasised that startups and AI entrepreneurs are the co-architects of India’s future and said that the country has immense capacity for both innovation and large-scale implementation. “PM said that the world’s trust in India is the country’s biggest strength. He emphasised the need to ensure that Indian AI models are ethical, unbiased, transparent, and based on data privacy principles,” an official statement said. The 12 AI startups, which were present in the meeting, have qualified for the ‘AI for ALL: Global Impact Challenge’ in the upcoming summit and comprised Avataar, BharatGen, Fractal, Gan, Genloop, Gnani, Intellihealth, Sarvam, Shodh AI, Soket AI, Tech Mahindra and Zenteiq. These 12 startups are working in a diverse set of areas, including Indian language foundation models, multilingual LLMs, speech-to-text, text-to-audio and text-to-video; 3D content using generative AI for e-commerce, marketing, and personalised content creation; engineering simulations, material research and advanced analytics for data-driven decision-making across industries; healthcare diagnostics and medical research, among others. Besides, Modi suggested that Indian AI models should be distinct and promote local and indigenous content and regional languages. The startups present in the meeting backed govt’s commitment to advancing the AI ecosystem and highlighted the vast future potential of the AI sector, observing that the centre of gravity of artificial intelligence innovation and deployment is beginning to shift towards India, the statement said.