"Real Magic When Cost Comes Down": Z47's Vikram Vaidyanathan At NDTV AI Summit

The real magic of artificial intelligence will happen when the cost comes down and the technology is available at scale, Z47's manging director Vikram Vaidyanathan said while speaking at the NDTV AI Summit in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Speaking during a session titled 'Investing In The AI Advantage', Vaidyanathan added that layering AI on top of the digital public infrastructure will democratise services pertaining to several sectors, including finance and health. "The only friction point is that the cost of inferencing is too high to be available on scale," he said. He added that the opportunities lie in helping the world build AI at scale and building tools that do the work, not help with it.

Emphasising the fast-changing AI landscape, Prosus' Ashutosh Sharma said the picture painted today will be obsolete tomorrow. "We are wired to be lazy and nobody needs to teach us things that make us more productive. Entrepreneurs need to understand that every sector is going to change you need to figure out which actions you want to drive," he said.

Sharma also said that the AI product market is best suited for India. "If you look at the Vedas and Puranas, there must be a prophecy about AI," he said in a lighter vein, adding that India is a complex and diverse country where the only leveller is technology that can be customised to need learning, health and other needs.

Talking about vibe-coding, Together Fund's co-founder Manav Garg said Emergent AI became one of the fastest growing companies in the sector in the world, touching a Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of 100 million dollars within months of being launched. Emergent AI, which creates production-ready applications from natural language without the need for developers, enables entrepreneurs to run an entire company on a vibe-coding platform, Garg said. He added that this brings down the cost of software dramatically.

While Sharma talked about the friction every new technology has faced, citing the example of cars, Vaidyanathan said India's strength lies in creating personalised agents for education, health, finance and other sectors. Early stage investor Harshjit Sethi said that the near future lies in taking what exists today and democratising that much.

Garg said the fundamental question lies around India's share in the global AI market. "MNCs have come and take away revenue in the past. The innovation has to happen beyond the frontier layer where Anthropic, OpenAI and others operate. EmergentAI has done that with production ready models," he said. He added that the need for a team that solves deep technological problems and the availability of capital.

"Capital is an advantage other countries have. I don't think the government alone can invest so much capital, we have to attract capital from outside. India has to be marketed and it is a global race," Garg said, as Sharma pointed out that US has 5,000 top AI researchers, while China has 3,000 and India has just 250.