EVP Jay Parikh on India and AI’s inflection point

Rahul Regulapati, founder and CEO of Galleri5, exemplifies the new kind of builder emerging in the agentic AI era: deeply technical, globally ambitious, and entirely comfortable building AI-native from day one. His studio recently released India's first AI-generated television series, but he isn't thinking local. He's ready to reach a worldwide audience.

At the same time, AI is at an inflection point. And as the pace of innovation accelerates, builders need more than tools. They need an operating layer that brings together development, deployment, governance, and security. Platforms like GitHub and Microsoft Foundry are evolving to meet that need, helping teams move from experimentation to production with trust, flexibility, and scale.

India is uniquely well-positioned for this moment. It combines three things that rarely show up together: developer velocity and scale, an enterprise sector deploying AI in production faster than its global peers, and digital public infrastructure (DPI) built for population-level use. Each factor makes the others more valuable.

Start with developer velocity and scale. On a recent trip to India, I sat down with a partner at one of the country's leading venture firms, and we found ourselves reflecting on the early days of the IT boom. India didn't lead the first wave of technological innovation-but it 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.

The numbers bear it out. As we shared at GitHub Constellation 2026, India is now home to GitHub's largest developer community (more than 27 million developers, with over 2 million joining the platform in 2026 alone). Developers in India are also 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-Hyperswitch in payments, ERPNext in enterprise, ToolJet in low-code, Bruno in API testing-are now used by developers worldwide.

Next, look at the enterprise sector. Indian companies are moving AI from experiment to production faster than most others in the rest of the world. According to a November 2025 EY-CII report, 47% of Indian enterprises now have multiple generative AI use cases live in production, with another 23% in the pilot phase. Deloitte's 2026 enterprise AI survey ranks India first out of 15 countries on at-scale AI adoption, and 40% of Indian respondents report significant or full AI use, against a global average of 28%. India isn't just experimenting. It's shipping.

Running underneath both is the infrastructure. Over the past decade, 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. Built on this stack, India's Direct Benefit Transfer system cut welfare leakage, resulting in savings of ₹3.48 lakh crore by eliminating ghost beneficiaries and improving targeting. 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.

This momentum is amplified by cross-pollination. India-based founders are building for global customers, working closely with partners and investors worldwide, and moving from insights to execution at speed. This is visible in companies like Sarvam AI, Krutrim, and Qure.ai. In an era where learning velocity is as important as AI model capability, this matters.

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.