India, April 10 -- Last year, I sat across from the CIO of a large Indian services company. We were showing him an AI product that could collapse a 14-step procurement workflow into three. He looked at the demo, nodded politely, and asked: "So it's like a better chatbot?"

It wasn't a better chatbot. It wasn't even close. But he had no mental model for what he was seeing. And without a model, the buyer defaults to the nearest thing they already understand.

India is betting big on AI. The government's investment signals are clear. The talent pipeline is deep. Indian IT services companies are racing to build AI practices. But there is a gap nobody is talking about: the companies building AI products are struggling to sell them. Not because...