Hello and welcome to India Business Hour. I'm Archana Solanki here with headlines we're tracking this evening. Technology gives you that power to meet that latent demand. And there's no need to panic. Tata Group is not pressing the panic button over AI disruption. Chairman N. Chandrasekaran says TCS will ride the AI wave and IT companies will have greater responsibilities in the AI era. TCS CEO K. Krithivasan says there is no need to panic. Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets Prime Minister Modi, says India is uniquely positioned in the AI race. Google's AI head Demis Hassabis says India can play a leading role in AI adoption for science. Also warns of potential misuse by bad actors. Sarvam AI launches a home-made large language model called Vikram to rival the likes of ChatGPT and Claude. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he's impressed with the work Sarvam has done in developing local models. US chip maker Qualcomm believes India can become the fastest growing AI nation in the world. President Cristiano Amon highlights India's ability to leapfrog technological stages as he pledges $150 million for AI startups. That's another exclusive. The US government is open to changing the enforcement of tariffs imposed on steel and aluminum, says trade representative Jamison Greer. 50% tariffs were imposed last year in a bid to curb imports from China, but many companies have argued the duties are complex and costly. French President Emmanuel Macron in Delhi to attend the AI summit. The finance minister of France says there's a lot of French investment in India, but not enough Indian investment in France. Urges Indian companies to invest in engineering, research, AI, and other sectors. G.V. Prasad of Dr. Reddy says most regulatory issues over its weight loss drugs in Canada are resolved and a launch is likely in May. Expects double-digit growth in India to continue. Hints at potential acquisitions in consumer health care. That's another exclusive. Government's telecom department urges Adani backed Navi Mumbai airport to allow telecom companies to deploy network infrastructure at its premises. The intervention from the government comes after telcos flagged that the airport authority had denied them right of way to deploy infra. Representatives from Noida's Galgotias University booted out of the AI summit after controversy over a robo dog. The university tried to pass off the robo dog made in China as their own innovation. And we'll come to that and much more in a bit, but first to take stock of the markets today. Markets registered its third straight day of gains. The Nifty 50 closed above the 25,800 mark with Reliance, ITC, Tata Steel, Axis Bank, L&T emerging as the top contributors. Indian IT stocks, however, took it on the chin. Stocks listed on the Nifty IT lost market cap worth 32,000 crore rupees. The big exclusive news maker this evening, the Tata Group is not pressing the panic button over AI disruption just yet. Speaking exclusively to CNBC-TV18, Group Chairman N. Chandrasekaran said, 'Fundamental infrastructure changes like AI brings with it new opportunities for growth.' He downplayed fears over AI disrupting the IT service business saying TCS is going to ride the AI wave and IT service companies will have greater responsibilities in the AI era.
You should look at IT services as a big enterprise business. In this enterprise business context is important. So, for example if there is a phenomenal invention that happens in a refrigerator or an air conditioner you as a consumer see that and then you get super excited. You will just throw your current refrigerator and put the new one. That's not the company's work. Companies have context. Companies have processes. Customer supplier partner ecosystem IT landscape so many products so many interfaces to be built. So, you should look at IT services companies as integrators. What do we do? IT services companies integrate a technology. Take SAP for example. So, I used to code at the time when SAP was not there or was not as popular. Or Oracle or anybody else. Or a salesforce. We used to build everything. Why? Even before that internet time there is there used to be things like web server, app server and all that. All of those things we used to hard code. So when these packages came first thing is okay, all these jobs will go away. Because you will buy this product, you put it, all these systems can be purged. You don't purge like that. To put a package, it takes some people have done it in 4 years. Some people are still doing it. No. So, I think the way to look at it is it will create enormous opportunities. AI is a very, very important multi-decadal change. Every company has to figure out has to ask fundamental questions. What is my mode?
If I can rephrase what you said, it's not going to be so easy to throw out United Services companies in the mix as is being made out to be. Essentially, that's the point that you're making.
The second point actually, the more important point I'm making is IT services companies rather system integrators will have a greater job, greater responsibility.
Yeah. They they do. One other point, but the companies have IT companies have to do a lot of work. Like like every other time, they've got to equip themselves with all the skills that are required. They've got to go through that. The execution. Yeah, they're going to the execution risk. Absolutely. The execution risk is going to be the key one.
There's so much happening and there's no need to panic. You have to think, sit back, relax, and think properly. There's so much of more work to be done. Every time there's a disruption, the work expands. And the good companies will participate, take a forward-leaning approach, invest in that, and they should be able to increase the pie. This is again based on a larger scheme. We believe that you will be able to participate more in the AI ecosystem if you operate across multiple layers. We are looking at participating right from the infrastructure layer. There's an infrastructure layer, there's a model layer, there's application layer, then there's an intelligence layer. We to increase our participation in each one of those layers. That's why you see we participating with TPG then signing up with AMD. We also signed up with some of the design companies. So that's a overall plan.
Now Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that India is uniquely positioned in the AI race. He's in the national capital to attend the India AI Impact Summit. Pichai met Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier and discussed potential AI collaborations. Speaking at the Bharat Mandapam, Pichai said that India was on an extraordinary trajectory in AI as the language ecosystem and digital infrastructure make for a powerful foundation for innovation. Google's AI head said India can play a leading role in AI adoption for sciences also warned of potential misuse by bad actors.
Today we are announcing a new $30 million google.org AI for science impact challenge to support researchers globally using AI to drive the next generation of scientific breakthroughs. We are excited to announce a partnership between Google DeepMind and the Indian government as part of the global national partnerships program. This will broaden access to frontier AI capabilities for national priorities. Also partnering with Atal Tinkering Labs to bring GenAI assistance to over 10,000 Indian schools and 11 million students with a focus on robotics and coding in the classroom.
I think it's just the beginning of the impact that AI is going to have on the sciences and medicine and I feel like India can play a very leading role in that adoption of AI to the sciences. Maybe what I would say for India but also many countries I also advise UK on this is to double down on the things you're already strong at and are important to the country. Perhaps it's agriculture for example and then be the leaders in applying AI to that space that you're already world-leading in.
Sarvam AI has launched homegrown large language models called Vikram. These will rival the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. These models are built to be used through voice commands and are accessible in 22 Indian languages. Rachna Dhanrajani is here with the details.
Well, Sarvam AI unveiled its frontier models at the India AI Impact Summit, and these include Sarvam 30B and 105B, which are particularly aimed at advanced reasoning and real-time enterprise workloads. The company also forayed into hardware through the launch of the AI-powered glasses called Kshem. Now, this is not all from Sarvam what we got to see today at the India AI Summit, because in the run-up to the summit, the company had a series of launches, pretty much a product blitz that they had. These include Bulbul, which is their text-to-speech model. The other models were speech-to-text systems, AI dubbing technology, vision and OCR capabilities, and conversational agent frameworks. The company has also introduced Sarvam Edge, which is its own device AI suite designed to run offline on phones and laptops, particularly aimed at enterprises and places where privacy is a sensitive matter, along with low-connectivity markets where internet would not reach, but AI can reach through Sarvam AI. With these set of announcements that were made today as well as in the run-up to the summit, Sarvam is trying and aiming to lead this AI frontier from the end, and that is exactly what we picked up from the investors and followers when we spoke to them around the launch. Back to you.
So, we have been releasing models already, which do very well on Indian languages. We are far ahead of other models in terms of the nuances that language brings in, and India is, of course, a hard benchmark in terms of AI for languages. But the other thing is we also want to be super competitive on other tasks like, for example, math and programming and calling tools, etc. So, we want to build for all of that, but Indian languages is a specific focus.
The entrepreneurship ecosystem here is thriving. You know, even recently the work has done developing local AI models. So, I think what you're talking about is actually happening and I just don't see any impediments to that and I think India is very, very well positioned.
All right, on to a CNBC-TV18 exclusive, US chip maker Qualcomm believes India can be among the world's fastest growing AI nations. Speaking to my colleague Shereen Bhan, the company's president and CEO Cristiano Amon highlighted India's ability to leapfrog technological stages as he pledged $150 million for AI startups. He added that India's AI opportunity lies in deploying tech at scale across its vast population and industries.
How the entire economy of Asia's going to get developed. I think India has an opportunity to be one of the fastest growing AI nations in the world.
We do have the talent. That's our biggest advantage, but you truly believe that AI is going to be the fastest AI nation? I think you're going to have different models going to be developed.
