NEW DELHI, Feb. 19 (TNT): A delegation of 120 U.S. chief executives, including Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, Raj Subramaniam of FedEx, Brad Smith of Microsoft and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst, arrived in the Indian capital on Thursday for the India AI Impact Summit, as U.S. technology firms prepare to invest $67.5 billion in artificial intelligence and data center infrastructure across India over the next five years.
The planned investment led by Microsoft, Amazon and Google, according to The New York Times is expected to position India as a strategic AI hub. Industry leaders, however, say returns will depend heavily on workforce readiness.
Seventy-four percent of Indian CEOs said talent preparedness will determine whether their companies grow over the next three years, according to KPMG’s India CEO Outlook 2025 report.
While infrastructure commitments are accelerating, executives and policymakers say skills development remains a key constraint.
The five-day summit, organized by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has drawn about 35,000 participants and more than 50 ministers from multiple countries.
The U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum is leading the American delegation, described by organizers as the largest U.S. business presence at an AI-focused event in India.
AI platform CambrianEdge.ai is serving as knowledge partner to the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum during the summit. Harjiv Singh, founder and chief executive of CambrianEdge.ai, moderated a panel on scaling AI literacy across enterprises.
Speakers included Girish Raghavan, chief technology officer of GE Healthcare; Vijay Guntur, chief technology officer of HCLTech; Kumaresh Pattabiraman, India country manager and vice president of product at LinkedIn; and Rohit Kumar Singh, former secretary to the Government of India and chair of the Global Value Chains Committee and adviser to the USISPF board.
Panelists discussed the distinction between AI literacy — the ability to use tools such as ChatGPT — and AI fluency, defined as the judgment required to validate or override AI-generated outputs.
Pattabiraman said India leads in both AI talent supply, growing at 12% year-on-year, and demand, which is rising 51%, while 60% of workers who require reskilling are not yet aware they fall into that category.
Guntur said HCLTech aims to double revenue with half the workforce while creating 4,000 new roles that did not exist 18 months ago, emphasizing employee enablement and visibility into new opportunities during transformation. Raghavan said GE Healthcare holds the largest number of U.S. FDA AI approvals and underscored that accountability for AI-assisted diagnostics remains with human professionals.
“India has the talent and ambition, but our edge will come from how fast we build execution capability across the workforce,” Singh said. “AI is already reshaping every role.”
While 78% of organizations have deployed AI tools, only 6% of employees report feeling comfortable using them effectively, according to Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise report, highlighting a gap that industry leaders say could slow returns on large-scale infrastructure investment.
CambrianEdge.ai said it is offering summit participants complimentary 30-day access to its marketing platform, which integrates content creation, research and analytics workflows.
The company said its platform is used by more than 300 organizations across 20 countries and focuses on building AI fluency through applied project work.
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