Artificial Intelligence is no longer a buzzword. It is now a national strategy. From the Prime Minister’s Digital India vision to the recently launched Rs 10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission, the Government of India has committed to building sovereign AI capabilities through compute infrastructure, foundational models, data platforms, and upskilling programs. These steps are timely and visionary. But there remains a critical missing layer in our discourse ~ one less about technology and more about transformation.
How do we make our institutions, teams, and missions truly AI-native? While India invests heavily in GPUs and large language models, much of our public and private sector still runs on manual work flows, top-down communications, quarterly planning cycles, and disjointed knowledge systems. We are building state-of-the-art AI at the edge ~ but the core, the institutional heart at the centre of our economy and governance, remains legacy systems. This is the real gap: not between having or lacking AI tools, but between using AI superficially and thinking with AI natively. To be AI-native means more than adopting AI. It means redesigning how decisions are made, how knowledge is shared and remembered, how intelligence is embedded into everyday systems, and how human and machine roles evolve collaboratively.
It’s the difference between layering AI on top of ex – isting processes, and reimagining the workflow itself with agents, data, and cognition integrated from the ground up. Across the world, countries are not just developing AI ~ they are redesigning their institutions around it. In the United States, the CHIPS and Science Act and the National AI Research Resource are enabling AI integration into public health, education, and national security. Cross-sector consortia are building data-rich policy models to simulate real-world impacts and redesign how government teams operate. China has taken an even more topdown approach.
AI is embedded in smart cities, agricultural planning, digital governance, and social infrastructure. Its focus is not merely on tools, but on deeply reconfiguring how institutions function and coordinate at scale. In both cases, governments are treating AI not as an accessory, but as a foundational redesign opportunity for public and organizational systems. India must chart its own course, drawing on the scale and coordination of China, the openness of the US, and the safeguards of Europe, while addressing the distinct needs of its own teams, structures, and public systems. Our approach must reflect In – dia’s linguistic and institutional diversity, its federal dynamics, and the realities of service delivery across geographies.
The rise of models like DeepSeek from China, Mistral from France, and Falcon from the UAE has also giv en hope that India too can rapidly build its own high-performing open-source AI systems tailored to its unique local needs Additionally, India stands at a defining moment. With over 100 million new internet users expected by 2027 and the world’s largest working-age population, we have unmatched scale. Our public digital infrastructure ~ Aadhaar, UPI, CoWIN ~ is globally respected as a model of frugal, inclusive transformation. The recently launched IndiaAI Mission is a bold first step. Its components ~ a national computer grid, multilingual open-source models, innovation centres, and fellowships lay down the hardware for India’s AI economy.
But infrastructure alone will not ensure adoption. According to NASSCOM, while 65 per cent of Indian enterprises plan to deploy generative AI tools within 18 months, only 11 per cent have a strategy to adapt their workflows and team operations to AI. This reflects a fundamental gap: the distance between experimentation and transformation. IndiaAI gives us the tools.
But for them to matter, we must rewire the institutions and teams that will use them. So what does AI-Native look like? Imagine policymaking teams simulating the impact of legislation before rollout ~ translating it across languages and modeling local variations. Imagine agricultural workers using voice-based AI tools trained on region-specific data to retrieve timely advice.
Or coordination rooms in the PMO and state secretariats supported by AI agents that process live updates, synthesise departmental insights, and help guide collective action. Imagine institutional knowledge that no longer retires with officials, but remains queryable, contextual, and available to every new team member. These are not futuristic dreams ~ they are being prototyped now. But to mainstream them, we must make being AI-native a core attribute of how our public and private organizations function. India must now move from AI adoption to institutional transformation.
This requires not just deploying software, but reshaping how our teams learn, plan, deliver, and evolve. Over the past year, several pioneering teams across sectors have begun to move beyond tool implementation towards AInative redesign. These efforts focus on integrating agents into workflows, reimagining how human expertise and machine intelligence co-create value, and designing systems where teams collaborate not just with each other, but with embedded cognition. To scale such transformation, we propose the following:
� Establish AI-Native Design Cells in every major ministry, PSU, and state department. These should be tasked with redesigning workflows and service delivery models with AI as a foundational element.
� Expand AI literacy beyond technologists to include administrators, teachers, planners, doctors, and every citizen-facing role.
� Develop a new cadre of transformation architects ~ professionals who combine institutional knowledge with systems thinking and AI fluency.
� Build persistent knowledge systems so that the intelligence developed by one generation of teams remains usable and evolving for the next.
� Encourage the emergence of India’s own “Group-Four+” ecosystem ~ a new class of transformation firms that go beyond traditional consulting. These firms must blend deep technical skills with contextual public understanding to help Indian institutions and teams become future-ready. India will need powerful intermediaries to translate the ambitions of the IndiaAI Mission into institutional change. The Big Four consulting firms ~ EY, Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG ~ have long played a role in modernisation and IT rollouts. However, their traditional playbook has limits when it comes to AI-native transformation. Their approaches are often focused on audits, compliance, and digital enablement ~ valuable, but insufficient for the kind of cognitive redesign AI demands.
These firms tend to work top-down, are less agile in adapting to public-sector nuances, and may lack deep technical fluency in generative AI, open-source models, or agent-based workflow design. India must foster a new generation of institutional transformation partners ~ firms that can go beyond digital dashboards to co-create intelligent workflows, cross-functional knowledge systems, and adaptive decision layers. This new “GroupFour+” must act as architects of institutional AI-readiness: grounded in Indian realities, fluent in multilingual contexts, and capable of designing systems that grow more intelligent over time. Over time, these India-based transformation groups could become global leaders, exporting models for how AI can be embedded responsibly into governance and development. India has repeatedly leapfrogged with alignment between infrastructure, ins – titutions, and people ~ whether in paymen – ts, health, or identity systems. AI demands the same alignment, but with a higher deg – ree of institutional and team evolution. IndiaAI is a strong foundation. But we now need to build the superstructure ~ teams that think and act natively with AI, systems where intelligence is not bolted on but built in, and institutions that adapt continuously through feedback, data, and learning. The authors have established Evvolv.ai, a consulting firm focused on institutional AI transformation.
They believe that India now needs a vibrant ecosystem of such firms ~ working collaboratively to bring the full potential of AI to governance, industry, and society. A synergistic approach among these transformation partners will be essential to ensure that the benefits of AI reach every corner of India. The authors welcome opportunities to support and partner with emerging firms in this space. The future will not be led by those who merely adopt AI. It will be led by those who evolve alongside it ~ teams and systems that are natively intelligent. Let India lead that future.
(The writers are, respectively, Founder of Evvolv.ai, a transformation company helping institutions become AI-native through system design, agent-enabled workflows, and cognitive decision systems, and an Advisor and Board Member at Evvolv.ai, as well as a global authority on clean energy and institutional risk)