E-Paper
Build it right: Why India's AI advantage starts with infrastructure
As enterprises shift from AI pilots to real-world deployment sovereign infrastructure and agentic AI are emerging as the foundation of India's next growth phase
Every technology wave has two phases. The first belongs to the curious - pilots, proofs of concept, early adopters testing what is possible. The second belongs to those who build. India has entered the second phase. The question now is not whether AI works. It is whether your organization is architected to make it work at scale and on your own terms.
IDC research commissioned by Dell Technologies found that 96 percent of Indian government leaders are actively pursuing Sovereign AI. Of those, 46 percent are evaluating technologies, another 46 percent are already running proofs of concept and an additional 4% have moved beyond experimentation into significant investment, underscoring growing institutional confidence in scaling sovereign AI capabilities. That is near-universal activation. But activation is not execution. The gap between intent and impact is where most organizations stall, and closing it requires more than ambition. It requires infrastructure.
Sovereign AI means control over your data, your models and your AI workloads without sacrificing access to global innovation. It means AI that operates within India's legal and regulatory framework, on infrastructure physically and jurisdictionally within the country, across India's 22 scheduled languages. Seventy percent of Indian government leaders recognize it as a strategic hedge against geopolitical risk national infrastructure in the same category as roads, power grids and telecommunications. India's Digital Public Infrastructure through Aadhaar, UPI, ONDC and Bhashini has already laid the trust layer. The execution layer is what comes next.
Agentic AI is what makes that execution transformative. Unlike earlier systems that simply responded to prompts, agentic AI reasons across tasks, connects data sources, orchestrates workflows and acts with greater autonomy. It does not just answer questions. It drives outcomes. India’s government leaders are not just moving fast; they are moving with a clear view of where AI is heading next. Almost all respondents (97.7%) express confidence in agentic AI as an adoption accelerator, Organizations still experimenting with generative AI are already a step behind.
Moving from experimentation to execution surfaces hard questions that cloud-only strategies cannot fully answer. Where does sensitive data get processed? How do you maintain performance without runaway costs? How do you meet compliance requirements that are increasingly local? The answer lies in distributed infrastructure, AI that operates closer to users, applications and the data that cannot leave the building.
The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is built for exactly this transition. Combining Dell's enterprise infrastructure with NVIDIA's accelerated computing and AI software, it gives organizations a production-grade foundation to deploy AI from the data center to the desk - practical, scalable and designed to move decisively from pilots to deployment at scale. Dell's Deskside Agentic AI solution allows enterprises to build and run autonomous agents locally, with data that never leaves the device. Dell's partnership with Zoho brings secure, configurable agentic AI directly into business applications through Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, maintaining strong security and privacy controls.
Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan Attorneys deployed a proprietary AI legal assistant on Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA running on Dell PowerEdge servers, PowerScale storage and PowerSwitch networking giving lawyers on-demand access to legal knowledge, regulatory updates and case law while measurably improving research efficiency and response times These are not experiments. They are the new baseline.
For India's CIOs, CXOs and government leaders, the inflection point is now. Sovereign AI is the trust layer. Agentic AI is the capability layer. Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is the execution layer. India has built the vision and the foundations. The organizations that move from experimentation to execution with confidence and speed will define India's AI decade.
To learn more, click here.
Note to the Reader: This article is part of Hindustan Times' promotional consumer connect initiative and is independently created by the brand. Hindustan Times assumes no editorial responsibility for the content.
