We visited the Indian AI Summit 2026. Here's our honest take: everyone was building wrappers, very few were thinking about sovereign Indian models, and adoption is painfully slow.
We went to the Indian AI Summit 2026 in February. 30+ countries, 300+ orgs, 4 days, ₹10,372 Cr IndiaAI Mission behind it. We had a notebook, a stack of business cards, and 2 specific questions: (1) who is building sovereign Indian models, (2) who is shipping production AI to Indian SMBs.
Zoho (Zia LLM — proprietary 1.3B / 2.6B / 7B family, MCP server, A2A protocol, 100M+ users, 16B AI API calls in H1 2025), Sarvam AI (Bengaluru, working on Indic models), Krutrim (Bengaluru, multilingual LLMs). That's it. The rest were wrapper companies — "we use OpenAI to do X for Indian customers" — which is fine for the use case but isn't sovereign.
The Zia LLM numbers are real: 100M+ Zoho users, 25+ AI agents baked into the Zoho suite, MCP server exposed. Most Indian SMBs are already on Zia without knowing it (Zoho Mail, Zoho CRM, Zoho Books all run on it).
Production AI to Indian SMBs: Sarvam (BFSI, manufacturing), Vernacular.ai (voice AI in 10 Indian languages, now Vernacular.ai + Vernacular.education), Mihup (conversational AI in 12 Indian languages), Haptik (WhatsApp commerce), and 2BFT (yes, us, agentic systems for jewellery shops, D2C brands, and schools in tier-3 towns). The 5 vendors combined probably serve 10K-20K Indian SMBs in production.
Compare that to UPI which serves 50M+ Indian SMBs. The AI adoption is at the equivalent of 2017-era UPI. There's a long way to go.
Three things missing from the summit: (1) A clear story for tier-2/tier-3 town builders — most booths were Bengaluru-first, (2) any talk about the actual cost of running an AI business in India (compute is still 1.4x US), (3) any serious talk about data sovereignty beyond "Indian data stays in India" platitudes. The 110 startups in the IndiaAI + Kalpa Impact repo are working on these problems but they weren't at the summit.
India is the 3rd largest AI ecosystem in 2026. That's real. The summit was 80% wrappers, 20% substance. The substance is good — the 3 sovereign model builders are real, the 5 production SMB-AI vendors are real, the ₹10,372 Cr is real. The wrappers are fine too — they pay salaries, they ship to real customers, they're not vapor.
What's missing is the small-town layer. The next summit should have a "Build for Bharat" track. We should be the one organising it. Maybe in 2027.
2BFT is a 2-person studio in Vaniyambadi, Tamil Nadu. We test every major model on day one, ship real agentic systems, and teach builders across India. Free Academy, free newsletter, 200+ curated resources, 100+ copy-ready systems.
