Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft, said on Tuesday, 26 May that India-based founders are building artificial intelligence products for global customers in close collaboration with partners and investors worldwide. Writing in a blog post, Parikh argued that India's combination of developer velocity, rapid enterprise AI adoption, and digital public infrastructure uniquely positions the country to deploy AI at population scale.

India's Developer Ecosystem by the Numbers

Parikh pointed to GitHub's developer community in India, which has crossed 27 million members, with more than 2 million joining the platform in 2026 alone. Indian developers are now the second-largest contributors to open-source projects globally, with over 7.5 million contributions to AI-specific repositories. 'India didn't lead the first wave of technological innovation — but it built one of the world's most important developer ecosystems and turned that foundation into a global engine of scale through the IT services industry,' Parikh wrote.

From Experiment to Production

Indian enterprises are moving AI from pilot to live deployment faster than most of their global peers, according to Parikh. As of November 2025, 47 per cent of Indian enterprises had multiple generative AI use cases running in production, with another 23 per cent still in the pilot phase. Deloitte's 2026 enterprise AI survey ranked India first out of 15 countries on at-scale AI adoption, with 40 per cent of Indian respondents reporting significant or full AI use — against a global average of 28 per cent.

The Agentic AI Builder: A Case Study

Parikh singled out Rahul Regulapati, founder and CEO of Galleri5, as emblematic of the new generation of agentic AI builders combining deep technical skills with creative ambition. Regulapati's studio released what is described as India's first AI-generated television series, illustrating how domestic founders are translating infrastructure advantages into globally relevant creative and commercial products.

AI Meets Digital Public Infrastructure

As AI converges with India's existing digital public infrastructure (DPI), the country is racing to become, in Parikh's framing, the world's first large-scale AI public infrastructure — with intelligent systems embedded across financial services, healthcare, and education. 'The next phase of AI won't be defined by who builds the best models, but by who can deploy them at scale with trust, speed, and real-world impact. India is uniquely positioned for that shift, and increasingly, it's where that future is taking shape,' Parikh wrote.

What This Signals for India's Tech Trajectory

The remarks from a senior Microsoft executive carry weight at a moment when global technology investment is concentrating around AI infrastructure. India's existing IT services backbone, combined with a young and rapidly growing developer base, gives domestic founders a structural head-start in productionising AI — a stage where many Western firms are still struggling. How India translates these advantages into sovereign AI capability and equitable access across sectors will be the defining question of the next decade.