Indian CEOs need to move beyond experimenting with AI chatbots and start building real products and solutions with the technology, Anthropic India MD Irina Ghose said, as enterprises accelerate AI adoption.
“Use it for yourself to build things, not just ask questions,” Ghose said during a panel discussion at The Economic Times World Leaders Forum in New Delhi, urging CEOs to identify their most complex business problem and create a dedicated task force to solve it using AI.
“If you put across the biggest out there, the rest will surely happen,” she said.
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Anthropic is already working with Indian enterprises and institutions across sectors. Ghose said the company is working with Axis Bank and Kotak Bank on engineering productivity, NPCI on agentic AI solutions, and systems integrators including TCS and Infosys.
It is also working with governments and NGOs on agriculture, education, skilling, healthcare and life sciences. Its AI for Science team is working with IISc on antivenom discovery, while it is working with Digital Green on AI-powered responses to farmers in multiple languages.
“Our mission here remains that it's not with a playbook that we've come in; it's to co-create the playbook which will work for India and then we take it globally,” Ghose said.
AI opportunity could be worth $4.4 trillion
Ghose cited McKinsey research estimating the economic value of AI at $4.4 trillion.
Indian companies currently invest around $2.6-2.8 billion in AI, according to research cited during the discussion, with companies surveyed by McKinsey planning to significantly increase investment over the next two years.
McKinsey partner Cheryl Lim said, however, that investing in AI does not automatically translate into business value.
While 80-90% of companies say they are investing in AI, a similar proportion say they have yet to see significant value from those investments, she said.
“The bigger part is how do we help our talent prepare for it, and what's the change management in place,” Lim said.
Companies that succeed will be those that redesign workflows, upskill and reskill employees and address anxiety around AI replacing jobs, she added.
India’s local needs meet global AI ambitions
SAP President–Asia Pacific Verena Siow said SAP's three-decade presence in India has helped it understand local requirements while developing technology for global markets.
Its Bengaluru labs are the company's largest outside Germany, with around 40% of the innovation it deploys globally developed from India, she said.
Ghose said local data residency and inference capabilities could further unlock AI adoption in regulated sectors such as banking, insurance and healthcare.
GIFT City’s edge is India access
Hans Christian Dall Nygård, Head of Private Equity at SPEC Finance, said GIFT City should not try to replicate Singapore or Dubai, which have decades of financial-market development behind them.
“GIFT City is not a copy-paste” exercise, he said. Its biggest advantage is access to India, one of the world's fastest-growing major markets.
Nygård said GIFT City could also eventually serve as a platform for Indian companies expanding overseas.
AI is already changing consulting
Asked whether AI could replace consultants, Lim said the industry is already being transformed, with analysts producing in minutes work that previously took weeks.
But she said AI would augment rather than eliminate consulting because strategy ultimately depends on people, culture and relationships.
“It's not about does AI replace, but how does AI augment the thinking?” she said.
AI, she added, could free consultants to focus more on human relationships, culture and capability building.
