India, July 29 -- For a man who joked that he did not have much hair, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan spends an unusual amount of time thinking about shampoo.

Standing before a room full of journalists and analysts in Mumbai, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tata Communications reached for the everyday consumer product to explain how he believes artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually reach India's small and medium businesses (SMBs). The largest technology companies, he said, can afford to design chips, build data centres, and develop foundation models. Others buy graphics processing units (GPUs) and train their own models. SMBs, however, do not want to make the shampoo. They simply want to use it.

"We've got the ingred...