India’s conversation about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dominated by two questions: How many jobs will it destroy and by how much can AI raise productivity especially in our large informal economy? Both matter. But a third question may matter more: What happens when the people closest to India’s biggest unsolved problems get direct access to AI, not just AI products?

In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, American author and columnist Kimberley Strassel described Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI abundance, then asked a profound question: Abundance for whom, and who decides? Her point wasn’t about redistributing AI’s gains. It was about which problems get chosen to be solved in the first place. She pointed to evidence that innovators build disproportionately for people like themselves. Female entrepreneurs create products with an 18% higher female customer share than male entrepreneurs in the same category.

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Entrepreneurs from high-income families build for high-income consumers. Venture capitalists have a name for this: founder-market fit. Strassel’s own students prove this; in nearly a decade of teaching a class on building companies around social problems, she’s never had a student propose fixing Medicaid or prison re-entry, but she did get teams building apps for 3........

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