NEW DELHI: The power of technology companies is shifting from software to AI models trained using proprietary data, said an executive at India’s first unicorn company InMobi. The company’s comments come at a time when the Indian government is supporting an open source model for developing sovereign AI models and discussions are taking place over the future of the country’s IT companies.
“The future for technology companies is that the power is not going to be in the software as much as it used to be. That power is shifting to proprietary models that are essentially training using their own data. So all the frontier models are commoditized. The value is in the models that have their own data,” Tewari said. He said that in addition to the frontier model, India needs to create its own vertical model for its region. ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic Claude 3 are some of the major frontier models used by several companies to offer AI-based services.
At the summit, Indian startup Sarvam unveiled a Frontier model that positions itself as a competitor to other global Frontier models. InMobi claims its mobile advertising service reaches 2 billion users in more than 150 countries and that it has developed a proprietary agent commerce system that works on more than 100 million devices worldwide, including mobile lock screens and smart TVs. Any AI model requires a large user base to fine-tune and train itself. The larger the dataset involved, the better the results. Tewari said there used to be an advantage in internet technology coming from the West, but that advantage has disappeared.
“It’s a level playing field now. We can actually test the product on a much larger number of consumers and then take it to the world. That’s our big advantage. We can build a product from here (India) and bring it to businesses all over the world. That kind of advantage didn’t exist before, and I think we’ve essentially been able to do that,” he said.
In his presentation at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Tewari said artificial intelligence has the potential to deliver over USD 3 trillion in additional economic benefits to India by 2047 by fundamentally reshaping the way commerce functions.
“We’re basically creating commerce models that are trained on unique consumer data. Basically, those models are trained to be different. The world is moving so fast. What we’ve seen in the last two or three years isn’t even valid anymore,” Tewari said.
