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Vijay Sharma
Vijay Sharma
CEO & Founder, Paytm
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PayTM CEO on India's AI Future: Why Being a User Is Being a Loser

📅 Oct 07, 2026 AIM Network 23 MIN 228 VIEWS 7 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
While India handles over 24 billion UPI transactions monthly, a testament to domestic tech execution. Paytm Founder & CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma argues that the country is risking its future by settling for being mere "AI users" and "sloppy wrapper writers" rather than building and owning sovereign foundation models. Speaking on Day 1 of Cypher 2026, Sharma challenges the belief that India lacks the capital or technical capability to own its intelligence, calling for a shift from consuming foreign AI stacks to building open-source, bottom-up intelligence models. In this exclusive interview reco...

What Vijay Sharma said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Vijay Sharma, CEO of Paytm, argued that India must move beyond being a mere user of AI and build its own models, calling the 'woke virus' of user-only mentality a losing proposition. He cited India's IT services history and startup ecosystem as proof of capability, but lamented the lack of AI talent and the tendency to be 'sloppy AI wrapper writers.' He compared the situation to Android's open-source model, which enabled China's smartphone manufacturing, and urged India to start building despite shortcomings. Sharma dismissed compute capacity as a limitation, calling it an opportunity, and advocated for vertical, use-specific models over horizontal ones. He highlighted agriculture, healthcare, and financial services as key areas for AI application. He committed to writing the first ₹1 crore check to support startups, and confirmed Paytm's agentic AI work, mentioning its Nebula AI lab and revenue generation, while declining to detail specifics to avoid the 'evil eye.'

Key takeaways

  1. India must build and own its AI models, not just be a user, to avoid being a 'third world' in AI.
  2. Sharma committed to writing the first ₹1 crore check to support startups, investing personal and company money.
  3. Paytm is already making revenue from agentic AI, with its Nebula AI lab building models and agents.
  4. India should focus on vertical, use-specific AI models rather than horizontal frontier models.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
₹1 crore First check to support startups commitment 1:36

Chapters

  1. 0:00India's AI ambition
  2. 1:36Building vs. using AI
  3. 4:14Open-source parallels

Questions asked in this interview

2
  1. 0:42What we're going to find out. Are you doing?
  2. 0:57So, that's where you started with, and where did you kind of finally conclude with, as far as your keynote was concerned?
Interviewer 0:00 ↗
Well, last month alone, basically 24.07 billion worth of payments were handled by UPI. And that's extremely exciting because also I am joined by a gentleman who is the founder and CEO of Paytm, and he has ensured that he's convinced even a tea stall vendor to accept payments in QR codes. So then, of course, definitely, that generates a huge amount of confidence. And I am having a conversation with the gentleman post his keynote, which I believe was quite exciting, and I was received wonderfully well with a lot of warmth and applause by the audience. It was a conversation about where probably India has lost its way in terms of building its own AI models.
I am talking about the one and only, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Or is it man or machine? We don't know. What we're going to find out. Are you doing? You know, you know, you know, you know. Thank you so much for being with us.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma 0:54 ↗
Man or machine, correct. Next people.

2 more exchanges in this transcript

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Sharma, V. (2026, October 7). PayTM CEO on India's AI Future: Why Being a User Is Being a Loser [Interview transcript]. AIM Network. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2997387/

MLA

Vijay Sharma. "PayTM CEO on India's AI Future: Why Being a User Is Being a Loser." AIM Network, 7 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2997387/.

BibTeX 
@misc{sharma2026_2997387,
  author       = {Vijay Sharma},
  title        = {PayTM CEO on India's AI Future: Why Being a User Is Being a Loser},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, AIM Network. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2997387/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}