New Delhi | India should look at creating an AI Economic Council to calibrate the pace of adoption of artificial intelligence in the country, the government's Economic Survey said Thursday, as it warned of concentration of market power in the hands of a few large global firms and cast a lens on other "asymmetries".
Recognising Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an economic strategy rather than a prestige technology race, it made a strong case for a bottom-up, multiple sector-specific approaches grounded in open and interoperable systems to promote collaboration and shared innovation.
This, it said, aligns with India’s strengths in human capital, data diversity and institutional coordination.
It favoured local alignment over pursuing big, frontier model build-outs, and pushed, instead, for smaller models, defined uses and sectoral needs.
India’s demand for AI is emerging from real-world problems rather than speculative frontier uses.
Citing healthcare, agriculture, urban management, education, disaster preparedness, and public administration, and many other areas that have potential for AI deployments, the survey highlighted the growing appetite for such systems that work on local hardware and operate in low-resource settings.
From early disease screening and precision water management to farmer market access, classroom analytics, and regional language interfaces, adoption is emerging where AI lowers costs and compensates for structural shortcomings, the survey noted.
Such uses signal a large and scalable market for frugal, application-focused AI solutions tailored to India’s economic and social landscape.
The Survey focused on aligning AI adoption with India’s structural realities -- capital availability, energy constraints, institutional capacity, and market depth, so technology choices reinforce long-term growth instead of creating fragile dependencies.
The Survey favoured an ‘AI Economic Council' for India to calibrate the pace of its adoption in the country, and reflected on the impact of the transformational technology on critical thinking and job market.
By embedding labour realities and social stability priorities into AI policy, the said Economic Council can ensure productivity advances without eroding employment and the dignity of work, it said.
The institution must work closely with private sector firms to develop a roadmap for AI deployment over the next decade, outlining crucial details such as the profile of jobs affected, the geographies where displacement will be most concentrated, and the magnitude of jobs that will be both automated and augmented due to AI, the survey suggested.
"The AI Economic Council must ensure that deployment of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ does not come at the cost of ‘Human Intelligence’," it asserted.
India is a labour-rich economy, and the unchecked replacement of the workforce by automation has destabilising effects, the survey cautioned.
"In this context, one of the most urgent responsibilities of an AI Economic Council is to calibrate the pace of AI adoption within the country," said the Survey, as it highlighted the power of transformational technology and captured its many nuances in a dedicated chapter dedicated to AI.
It flagged "looming uncertainties" and "asymmetries" in the evolving AI landscape, drawing attention to issues from the concentration of market power in the hands of few large global frontier model builders, all the way to questions around future of the Indian IT sector.
While India enters the AI era with notable strengths, access to cutting-edge compute infrastructure is limited and financial resources for large-scale model training remain scarce compared to global leaders, making pursuit of foundational models as the centrepiece of AI strategy "challenging", the Survey said.