By Sanket Atal, SVP, Engineering and Country Head, OpenText India
India’s AI infrastructure will set global benchmarks, with massive-scale GPU clusters enabling telecom innovation and a new wave of AI-native public and commercial services tailored specifically to India’s needs.
India’s investment in multimodal, multilingual models like BharatGen will yield tangible products – public sector chatbots, voice assistants and image analysis tools in 22 languages, linking millions in both urban and rural areas.
2026 will see a surge in startups and government-backed pilots building on this infrastructure – especially in health, education, and e-governance – showing AI’s shift from lab to everyday life, and propelling India to a global AI leadership position
AI’s Transformative Role in 6G Networks
Networks will evolve from being smart to being self-aware – capable of healing, optimizing, and adapting on their own.
We’re entering the era of agentic AI, where intelligence is built deep into every layer of the network from the core to the edge and customer interface.
AI will not only drive efficiency within networks but also redefine customer experience. Predictive maintenance, intelligent traffic routing, and real-time personalization will become standard. 6G trials are expected to begin around 2028, and these early implementations will set the foundation for intelligent, autonomous networks.”
AI governance frameworks
Continuous risk assessment, including bias monitoring, privacy, and data security audits, will be built into the AI project lifecycle across sectors. Institutional frameworks for risk management will be mature, with many organizations appointing Chief AI or Ethics Officers and forming internal AI Ethics Committees.
By 2026, there will be broad acceptance that hybrid cloud is a permanent one. The real sovereignty challenge isn’t where the cloud sits but where data resides and how securely it flows between environments. Every enterprise holds “keys to the castle” data that must remain protected, even as it interacts with public and private AI models.