Whether you are ready or not, we are in the midst of a civilisational transition. The last of this magnitude was the Industrial Revolution, which took two centuries to play out. This one will take two decades.

According to the Stanford AI Index, the cost of querying a model at GPT-3.5 level performance fell from $20 per million tokens in November 2022 to just $0.07 by October 2024, a 280-fold collapse in cost in only 18 months. On the SWE-bench, which measures real-world software engineering ability, AI systems improved from solving 4.4 per cent of problems in 2023 to 71.7 per cent in 2024. As of 2025, 88 per cent of surveyed organisations reported using AI in at least one business function, up from 55 per cent just two years ago (McKinsey), while generative AI has reached 53 per cent population adoption in only three years, faster than the personal computer and the internet at comparable stages of their lifecycles.

This is what a structural fall in the cost of intelligence looks like. Intelligence is becoming cheaper, more abundant and more widely deployable at a pace no previous general-purpose technology has matched. That should force every government, enterprise and institution to rethink its assumptions. For India, however, the most important question is not whether AI will reshape the global economy. It already is. The question is whether we can capture value from this transformation or merely supply inputs into someone else’s success.

That is the uncomfortable paradox. India contributes a vast share of the world’s digital exhaust, linguistic diversity and human context to global AI systems, yet the frontier model layer remains heavily concentrated elsewhere. Nearly 90 per cent of notable frontier models in 2024 came from the US, according to Stanford. In other words, India is helping train the intelligence layer of the future, but without sovereign compute, data architecture and model capacity, much of that value accrues abroad rather than at home.

And yet India is not starting from weakness. In fact, it possesses four advantages that few countries can match: Talent, regulatory openness, scale, and renewable energy.

First, talent. India ranks first in AI skill penetration at 2.8 times the global average, ahead of both........

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