New Delhi, Dec. 17 -- As Big Tech companies look to expand beyond English-speaking users, developing artificial intelligence (AI) expertise across a wider range of languages is emerging as the next major hurdle.

Google's latest effort has seen the company embed 29 Indic languages and dialects into Gemini, its foundational AI model, as it looks to scale AI adoption across India's hinterlands, three years after it began work in the area. A foundational model is one that can accept user queries and respond in human-understandable languages.

According to Manish Gupta, senior director at the company's research arm, Google DeepMind, and its spearhead in AI language research efforts in India, proficiency in Indic languages is critical for last...