The artificial intelligence (AI) story of India is facing a paradigm shift, replacing experimental pilot implementations with high-impact and scale manufacturing. In a massive breakthrough event at the Google AI Startups Conclave on January 15, 2026, Google executives and industry leaders pointed out that almost 47% of Indian enterprises have already migrated their use cases of AI to production, which is an undoubted move towards sustainable, revenue-based business models.

Program focus

Although the trip between research laboratories and useful prototypes has become resilient within the past few years, most Indian startups continue to have issues with the so-called commercial final mile, the hard part of the journey between a successful pilot and a repeatable enterprise adoption. To solve this, Google created the Market Access Program, which is a specialized engine that assists AI-first startups in growing in a responsible way.

The program targets three outcomes that are critical to founders. Enterprise Readiness offers competitive programs on global enterprise selling, multifaceted pricing models, and international buyer psychology. Global Network, which introduces the global network of Google CIOs and CXOs. International Immersion, forging physical connections with major tech and buying centers around the world.

Full-stack support and concept of Bharat-tested

Google repeated its support to the Indian ecosystem in the form of a full-stack, including infrastructure, advanced models, and safety. The next major element of this plan is the future Global AI Hub in Visakhapatnam, a 1-gigawatt hub, and should be seen as an AI economy anchor point in the long term.

Google also added to its Gemma open model family to drive deep-tech innovation. MedGemma 1.5 is an open-source 4-billion-parameter model that is intended to support healthcare AI on a population scale. It aids in complicated medical imaging, such as CT scans, MRIs, and histopathology. This is after it partnered with AIIMS to create the Health Foundation Models in India.

FunctionGemma, an open-source lightweight system optimized to support a function call, allows startups to create AI agents with low latency that can operate reliably on even low-end devices, without constant internet connectivity.

According to the recently released Bharat AI Startups Report 2026, a Google-Inc42 collaboration, it is estimated that the AI market in India will become a $126 billion industry by 2030. The report repositions the peculiarities of India that include language diversity and incomplete connectivity as the strongest competitive advantage.

The Bharat-tested concept is becoming a worldwide standard of resilience. The assumption is straightforward: once an AI agent can perform at a high level of reliability with a rural user in India and different dialects and limitations, it is viable to be successful in any part of the world. In addition, since computing costs are declining because of mass digital infrastructure, founders are no longer investing their capital in infrastructure maintenance but in pure product innovation.

Conclusion

The age of artificial intelligence buzzwords is giving way to the stage of quantifiable results and execution discipline. Going into the year 2026, trust-by-design has become the center of interest among Indian startups as they strive to secure the ability to win long-term enterprise contracts by incorporating safety and privacy into the core of their products.

As sovereign AI projects overlap, innovation costs drop, and the ecosystem is supported by players on the global stage, such as Google, India is quickly emerging not only as a consumer of AI but also as a main source of globally competitive and resilient AI applications.