India is uniquely positioned to lead the next phase of global AI deployment, driven by a massive developer base, rapid enterprise adoption, and robust digital public infrastructure, according to Microsoft Executive Vice President of CoreAI, Jay Parikh. In a blog post on Tuesday, Parikh highlighted that developers in India are the second-largest contributors to open source globally, with more than 7.5 million contributions to AI-specific projects. Open-source projects built in India, such as Hyperswitch, ERPNext, ToolJet and Bruno, are now being utilised by developers worldwide. As per Microsoft, India didn't lead the first wave of technological innovation but built one of the world's most important developer ecosystems and turned that foundation into a global engine of scale through the IT services industry. As ETEnterpriseAI reports, Parikh emphasized that "the next phase of AI won't be defined by who builds the best models, but by who can deploy them at scale with trust, speed, and real-world impact. India is uniquely positioned for that shift, and increasingly, it's where that future is taking shape."
The scale of India's developer community has expanded significantly, with GitHub reporting a community of more than 27 million developers in India, including more than 2 million who joined the platform in 2026. This growth demonstrates the country's rapid evolution from a consumer of technology to a global creator, with Indian developers increasingly building AI products for international customers while working closely with partners and investors worldwide. As Parikh noted, this new generation of builders in the agentic AI era, exemplified by founders like Rahul Regulapati of Galleri5, who released India's first AI-generated television series, reflects the country's transition to becoming a global AI innovation hub. As ETEnterpriseAI reports, this new generation is increasingly where the future of AI deployment is taking shape.
Highlighting the country's rapid enterprise adoption, Parikh cited Deloitte's 2026 enterprise AI survey, which ranks India first out of 15 countries on at-scale AI adoption. According to the survey, 40 per cent of Indian respondents report significant or full AI use, compared to a global average of 28 per cent. As reported by Microsoft, Indian companies are moving AI from experimentation to production more quickly than many others worldwide, with 47% of Indian enterprises having multiple generative AI use cases live in production as of November 2025, while another 23% were in the pilot stage. The next phase of AI deployment will be defined by who can deploy models at scale with trust, speed, and real-world impact, and India is uniquely positioned for this shift.
Underpinning this growth is India's digital public infrastructure, which has been built over the past decade. According to Microsoft, India has built identity, payments, and data platforms operating at population scale. UPI, India's digital payments system, now processes more than 20 billion transactions a month, roughly half of all real-time payments globally. As AI converges with DPI, India is moving toward what could become the world's first large-scale AI public infrastructure, where intelligent systems are embedded into everything from financial services to healthcare and education. As ETEnterpriseAI reports, this convergence positions India to build the world's first large-scale AI public infrastructure, with intelligent systems embedded across sectors such as financial services, health care and education. Parikh emphasized that India's digital public infrastructure could help make the country the world's first large-scale AI public infrastructure.
