Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has stated that India is quite well positioned to influence the development of AI on a global platform. The tech giant's CEO told Mint at the roundtable during Google's annual Google I/O 2024 conference. He said: “For India and other emerging economies, technological changes are an opportunity to catch up or leap forward.”

He further added that while India is unlikely to catch up with developed countries in terms of computer penetration, mobile adoption has seen a majority of people gain access to phones than previous generations. He noted that many Indian users even forgo landlines and instead use mobile phones directly in the country. He added that with every technological change there is an opportunity to increase penetration, which is also true in the case of AI.

Google's push for AI adoption is fueled by attracting developers to the Gemini-powered AI ecosystem. Pichai revealed that many of their developers come exclusively from India. He explained: “In terms of our user base, India is the number one geographical region for many of our products. To serve them, we are keen to offer the same AI tools globally. We are already seeing a lot of developer activity from India in addition to our AI platforms. I think this will be an exciting moment and India will be well positioned to transition to AI.”

YouTube and Google Search are among the most popular Google products in India. YouTube has over 480 million active users from India. He said: “Our work is particularly applicable to products like Search and YouTube, and as we use AI, one of the reasons we are working on products like SynthID and AI-powered red teaming is to stay ahead of these problems.”

As India holds elections, Google has promoted the SynthID tool to watermark content and prevent AI manipulation. India has also witnessed several deepfake cases during the ongoing election season, including that of Ranveer Singh, Amir Khan and others.

On the role of AI in elections, Pichai explained: “Given the pace of technological advancement, we have all been worried about deepfakes.” So far, at least this year, we are fortunate that as a society we can still easily decide what is real and what not. Combined with all the work we are doing, I am cautiously optimistic that we can do our part and get through everything well. This year the stakes will be higher, but for now I’m cautiously optimistic about where we are.”

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