India, July 14 -- India stands at an inflection point in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The debate is often framed as a binary choice: Should India invest in building its own large language models (LLMs), or should it simply build AI applications on top of models developed elsewhere? This is the wrong question. The right strategy is not "build versus use." It is "build enough to remain technologically sovereign while winning commercially at the platform and application layers."

There is little doubt that the greatest commercial opportunity over the next five years lies above the foundation model layer. Intelligent model routing, enterprise AI infrastructure, trusted data platforms, multimodal AI, edge deployment, and domain-specific syste...