“We are exporting data, we are importing AI.”
This is analogous to India exporting raw cotton and importing textiles during the Industrial Revolution.
On the topic of intelligence as a subscription: “We need to think of AI as a tool just like any other tool. We need to use it as a cycle with pedal control being with us and not think of it as a car where the machine handles all the factors.”
I heard these quotes in a bilingual interview by TV celebrity Gobinath of Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of India’s own AI company, Sarvam AI.
Both observations are grounded and unusually clear-eyed for the genre. The data-as-raw-material framing cuts through a lot of noise. India generates enormous quantities of behavioural, linguistic, entertainment, health and transactional data. It then gifts it to foreign models that return it as inference, priced in dollars, hosted on servers outside our jurisdiction. The cotton analogy holds precisely because the value extraction mechanism is the same: we supply the input, someone else captures the margin.
The bicycle framing is equally useful. The real risk with AI is not that it fails. It is that it succeeds so spectacularly that people stop steering. The bicycle metaphor keeps the human in the loop by design, not by aspiration.
I kept thinking about both ideas long after the episode was over. They are not the default in AI conversations in India.
But if I am being honest, I also see many Indian entrepreneurs using sovereignty and caution as a frame for slower innovation and adoption dressed up as strategy. The two are very different things.
Pratyush Kumar and Sarvam AI are doing genuinely important work and thinking about it more carefully than most. The ideas deserve serious engagement, well beyond whether India can compete with frontier models from the US and China.
If that question is one you are sitting with too, the Founder Catalyst Digest is where I work through exactly this, practical, no-hype lessons from three decades of building technology businesses.
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