New Delhi, March 23 -- Just weeks ago, India hosted the 2026 AI Impact Summit, the latest chapter in a global process that began in the United Kingdom in 2023. For India, the stakes could not be higher: it is a country with immense technical talent and a data-rich digital ecosystem, but also a services-led growth model that AI could either boost or seriously disrupt. For the Modi government, the summit was part diplomatic showcase, part investment pitch, and part declaration of ambition. To discuss the summit and its key takeaways, Anirudh Suri appeared on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Suri is a non-resident scholar with Carnegie India, where he works on issues related to technology, geopolitics, climate, and strategic affairs. He is also a managing partner at India Internet Fund, a technology-focused venture capital fund based in India and the United States. He is the author of The Great Tech Game: Shaping Geopolitics and the Destinies of Nations, published in 2022. Suri spoke on the show about the evolution of global AI summitry, the debate over India's elusive "DeepSeek moment," and the country's indigenous large language models (LLMs). He also discussed the potential effects of AI on India's services industry and the country's efforts to marshal its domestic scientific talent. Suri told host Milan Vaishnav that one of India's greatest assets in the AI race is its talent. However, he cautioned against conflating Indian-origin talent with talent residing in India. "India cannot pat itself on the back for the fact that 16% of the top-tier talent in AI is of Indian origin," Suri cautioned. "That is great, but you want to make sure that a large chunk of that talent is either in India or working toward the development of AI in India." Suri also noted that AI talent differs from the skill sets that have long powered India's IT services sector. "India is known as a software nation and an IT-services nation, but the talent sitting in firms like Infosys, Wipro, and TCS [Tata Consulting Services] is very different from the kind of tech talent you need in the world of AI," he said. Suri categorised the talent needed to excel in AI into three tiers: a top level consisting of researchers conducting cutting-edge work; a second tier that adapts models and applies them to specific sectors and use cases; and a broader third tier focused on implementation. "India has a lot of the third category and, to some extent, the second. But, India does not have a big presence of the top-tier AI research talent," he offered. On the question of why India has not yet experienced a breakthrough "DeepSeek moment" - referring to the shockwaves caused by the arrival of the low-cost Chinese LLM - Suri reminded listeners that China's moment "came after two decades of massive investments in R&D, talent, and the university ecosystem". In contrast, "India seriously started working on AI in 2021 or 2022-so it's been four years. My sense is that we are looking at another two or three years before we might see an Indian DeepSeek moment." Suri also expressed concern about the vulnerability of India's IT sector to the rapid changes brought about by AI. "India is very vulnerable from an economic value-capture standpoint and, even more importantly, from an employment standpoint," he stated. "If people are creating vast amounts of wealth in IT firms in Bangalore, there is a massive support ecosystem-real estate, services, healthcare, education. So, there is employment within the firms, but there is also indirect employment dependent on their success. Because these firms are vulnerable, India is massively vulnerable."...