The Economic Times Concludes ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025: India's AI Leaders Call for 'Hard Differentiation' and Sovereign Safeguards

BENGALURU, India, March 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The inaugural ET AI Conclave & Awards, convened under the banner '2025' to mark India's AI inflection year, concluded today in Bengaluru, marking a definitive shift in India's technology landscape from speculative interest to large-scale execution. The event brought together over 250 of the nation's most influential CXOs, founders, and policymakers to address the critical pillars of Trust, Sovereignty, and Scale.

The conclave featured substantive discussions on India's role as an AI architect rather than just a consumer. Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam AI - one of India's leading indigenous language model ventures - delivered a warning against 'digital colonialism,' urging India to build auditable, sovereign models to ensure data security and long-term strategic independence.

PhonePe CTO, Rahul Chari cautioned against rushing AI deployments to production without the 'right scaffolding,' advocating for AI-first engineering that prioritises architecture over hype. In the 'Build, Borrow, or Burn' session, Paras Chopra, founder of LossFunk (a probabilistic forecasting and decision intelligence firm), and Peeyush Ranjan, CEO of Fermi.ai (an enterprise AI reasoning platform), argued that as software development becomes commoditised, true competitive differentiation will only emerge from solving 'extremely hard' problems that resist easy replication. A grand jury of industry leaders - including Naveen Tewari (Founder & CEO, InMobi), Srikanth Velamakanni (Co-founder & Group CEO, Fractal Analytics), and Sharad Sanghi (CEO, Neysa) - tackled the bubble debate head-on. The panel reached a clear consensus: AI is not a bubble, but an existential reset that Indian enterprises can no longer defer.

"The ET AI Conclave has proven that India is no longer a passive recipient in the global AI race," said Puneet Kukreja, VP – Business Head, Economictimes.com. "By focusing on functional excellence and sovereign capability-building, our winners and speakers have laid a replicable blueprint for an AI-first India - one positioned to serve not just its own 1.4 billion people, but the broader emerging world that has long been underserved by Western AI models."

In a finding that runs counter to prevailing mainstream narratives, the jury concluded that AI's transformative potential in India is still significantly underhyped. However, the panel flagged an urgent 'compute crisis': India's current GPU capacity (approximately 50,000–60,000 units) lags significantly behind global peers, necessitating a massive ramp-up in infrastructure investment and risk capital to remain competitive.

The evening culminated in the recognition of organizations that have moved decisively past experimentation to deliver measurable business impact. Winners were announced across three tracks - Enterprise, SME, and Startups, with the evaluation emphasising real-world deployment at scale over pilot-stage proof of concepts.

AI for India Leader:
Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder, Sarvam AI

AI Entrepreneur of the Year:
Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO, InMobi and Glance

AI Team of the Year 
Clinical AI team at Qure.ai

AI Technologist of the Year
Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder, Sarvam AI

AI Woman Leader of the Year:
Irina Ghose, Managing Director, India, Anthropic

AI Young Leader of the Year (Under 30)

(a) Anirudh Sharma, Founder and CEO, Digantara,
(b) Rahul Rawat, Co-founder and COO, Digantara
(c) Tanveer Ahmed, Co-founder and CTO, Digantara

AI Business Leader of the Year, Srikanth Velamakanni, Whole-time Director and Group Chief Executive and Executive Vice-Chairman, Fractal

And many more.

Innovation and Impact Awards

AI Startup of the Year (E-commerce and Quick Commerce): Zepto

AI Startup of the Year (Defence and Public Services): Digantara

AI-Native Large Enterprise: Jio Platforms Ltd.

And many more.

Special Awards

Best Use of AI in Customer Service: ICICI Lombard General Insurance Co. Ltd. 

Best AI-Powered Platform: Jio Platforms Ltd. 

Best AI-Powered Platform: Uniphore

And many more.

Functional Excellence Awards

AI in Marketing and Product Innovation: Hindustan Unilever Limited.

AI-Driven Cybersecurity: Jio Platforms Ltd.

AI-Powered Automation and Robotics: NewSpace Research & Technologies Private Limited.

Best Use of AI in Business Operations: Blue Machines AI

And many more.

The ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025 was made possible by the support of its partners: BYD (driving partner), L&T Finance (NBFC partner), Snowflake (AI Data Cloud partner), EY (evaluation partner), T-Hub (Ecosystem partner), Zoho (Technology partner) and Indri (Celebration Partner). Moreover, the gifting partners of the event include Vahdam India, Vaaree, Natch, and Andamen. Their collective involvement reflects the growing convergence of capital, infrastructure, and professional services around India's AI ambitions.

For the full list of winners and session highlights, visit: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-ai-awards-2025

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