Unlocking the AI Edge for MSMEs
The India AI Impact Summit 2026, held in New Delhi from 16 to 20 February, concluded with the adoption of the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact. Rooted in the civilisational ethos of ‘Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya’ (welfare for all, happiness for all), the declaration articulates a unifying vision: The benefits of AI must be equitably shared across humanity while respecting national sovereignty and promoting multistakeholder cooperation.
At the summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi articulated the MANAV vision for AI, a human centric framework grounded in Moral and ethical systems; Accountable governance; National sovereignty; Accessibility and inclusion; and Verifiable, lawful, and transparent AI. These principles reinforce India’s call for ‘AI for All’, positioning AI as a multiplier of human aspirations, ethics, and dignity.
With over 100 million weekly users of an AI chatbot in India, it is clear that AI has been consumerised at scale in the country. This also demonstrates how AI adoption can be accelerated when access barriers are lowered and digital readiness is high.
India’s Digital Public Infrastructure is enabling AI solutions to scale rapidly and affordably across healthcare, education, agriculture, and governance. Platforms such as MeghRaj GI Cloud and the IndiaAI Compute Portal are democratising access to shared computing resources including graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), significantly lowering entry barriers for startups, researchers, and institutions. IndiaAI Kosh provides datasets and AI models across sectors, while the AI Data Labs Network and the National Supercomputing Mission are strengthening grassroots skills and highperformance computing capacity nationwide. Collectively, these initiatives are ensuring that AI innovation in India remains broad-based, affordable, and inclusive, aligned with the spirit of the New Delhi declaration.
With consumers actively adopting AI and government platforms firmly in place, the pivotal question is how will AI be consumerised and scaled across India’s industrial economy? The answer lies in how effectively the AI advantage is unlocked by India’s 7,59,56,661 MSMEs— including informal micro enterprises (IMEs)—which form the backbone of the country’s industrial and employment landscape.
The report takes that question head-on with a focus on manufacturing MSMEs, which accounted for approximately 35.4% of India’s manufacturing value added in FY23–24 and nearly 48.58% of exports in FY24–25.
Read full report here.