Artificial Intelligence is no longer a buzzword. It is now a national strategy. From the Prime Minister’s Digital India vision to the recently launched Rs 10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission, the Government of India has committed to building sovereign AI capabilities through compute infrastructure, foundational models, data platforms, and upskilling programs. These steps are timely and visionary. But there remains a critical missing layer in our discourse ~ one less about technology and more about transformation.

How do we make our institutions, teams, and missions truly AI-native? While India invests heavily in GPUs and large language models, much of our public and private sector still runs on manual work flows, top-down communications, quarterly planning cycles, and disjointed knowledge systems. We are building state-of-the-art AI at the edge ~ but the core, the institutional heart at the centre of our economy and governance, remains legacy systems. This is the real gap: not between having or lacking AI tools, but between using AI superficially and thinking with AI natively. To be AI-native means more than adopting AI. It means redesigning how decisions are made, how knowledge is shared and remembered, how intelligence is embedded into everyday systems, and how human and machine roles evolve collaboratively.

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It’s the difference between layering AI on top of ex – isting processes, and reimagining the workflow itself with agents, data, and cognition integrated from the ground up. Across the world, countries are not just developing AI ~ they are redesigning their institutions around it. In the United States, the CHIPS and Science Act and the National AI Research Resource are enabling AI integration into public health, education, and national security. Cross-sector consortia are building data-rich policy models to simulate real-world impacts and redesign how government teams operate. China has taken an even more topdown approach.

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AI is embedded in smart cities, agricultural planning, digital governance, and social infrastructure. Its focus is not merely on tools, but on deeply reconfiguring how institutions function and coordinate at scale. In both cases, governments are treating AI not as an accessory, but as a foundational redesign opportunity for public and organizational systems. India must chart its own course, drawing on the scale and coordination of........

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