For years, India has been a crucial testing ground for Google, evolving from a vast consumer market into a unique innovation lab. Products like Google Tez (now Google Pay) and the 'Two-wheeler mode' in Maps were born here to solve local challenges, later influencing global strategies. This era was defined by 'Solve for India.' Today, a more significant transformation is underway. Google is now leveraging India's complex realities to build deep-tech and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions destined for the world.
India as the Global AI Engine Room
At the recent 'Lab to Impact' dialogue in Delhi, supported by the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Google unveiled a series of partnerships marking this strategic shift. Dr. Manish Gupta, senior director at Google DeepMind, emphasized that India is no longer just a market but the 'engine room' for globally scalable AI. The focus is on creating inclusive AI that benefits humanity, starting with India's diverse population of over a billion people.
'Being in India, where so much of humanity resides, we take that humanity part very seriously,' Dr. Gupta told The Times of India. The goal is to develop solutions for diverse languages and cultures, then scale them efficiently to serve billions globally.
From Healthcare Digitization to AI-Powered Farms
Google's announcements target core Indian challenges with global potential. A major initiative involves digitizing India's fragmented healthcare system. Google is collaborating with the National Health Authority (NHA) to use AI for converting millions of unstructured paper records and handwritten notes into the machine-readable FHIR standard.
Furthermore, Google is injecting $400,000 in funding to build India's Health Foundation Models using MedGemma. Startups like Ajna Lens will partner with AIIMS to create models for dermatology and outpatient triaging. 'If an AI model can identify a skin condition on diverse skin tones, it is robust enough to work almost anywhere,' noted Dr. Gupta.
In agriculture, Google.org is providing $2 million to Wadhwani AI to develop 'Garuda,' a new Indian language model for farming. It will power AgriVaani, a multilingual AI assistant offering crop and pest advice. This aligns with the next AI evolution: 'Agentic capabilities,' where AI doesn't just answer questions but solves complex problems by synthesizing data like pest type, weather, and soil health.
Conquering the Language Barrier
For AI to work in India, it must speak India's languages. Google announced a $2 million contribution to establish the Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay. This builds on Project Vani, which has collected speech data from across India, covering over 110 languages. For at least 22 of these languages, this is the first-ever digital data available.
Google.org also announced $8 million in funding for four government AI Centers of Excellence at institutes like IISc Bangalore (health), IIT Kanpur (urban governance), IIT Madras (education), and IIT Ropar (agriculture).
The Challenge: Building Responsible and Efficient AI
Dr. Gupta acknowledged that creating AI for the world from India involves monumental challenges. Beyond infrastructure, the key hurdles are making models more energy-efficient, free of biases, and culturally aware. 'You shouldn't just think in English and translate to Assamese. You should respond rooted in the user's cultural context,' he explained.
On tackling AI 'hallucinations,' Gupta stated Google employs a rigorous responsible AI framework, including 'red teaming' where teams deliberately try to break models to uncover unsafe outputs. He called AI 'the biggest and most powerful technology enabler... even bigger than electricity and fire,' with the potential to solve previously intractable problems.
The narrative has decisively shifted. India is not merely a beneficiary of Silicon Valley's tech but a source of sophisticated AI solutions. 'We have innovators developing these solutions using AI, so there's that opportunity for India to become a global leader right from the start,' Dr. Gupta concluded. By turning India's unique challenges into a research advantage, Google and its partners are writing a playbook for the rest of the world.
