India, April 9 -- Consider, a centrifugal pump at a manufacturing plant in Gujarat that fails without warning. Production halts, maintenance crews scramble, and the cost runs into lakhs even crores. Now, consider an alternative: an AI system trained on vibration, temperature, and acoustic data that had already identified a bearing fault a week earlier and flagged it for maintenance. The pump never failed! This is industrial AI!!

However, unfortunately this is not the type of AI that dominates our boardroom or policy conversations. When we look at today's technology discussions in India at industry forums, policy briefings, or investment summits, the focus is almost entirely on sovereign large language models, GenAI, and building India's ...