Navtez Bal of Red Hat says India can dominate AI faster by customising open source models instead of building its own, avoiding vendor lock-in and retaining full control over data and code.
India does not need to build its own foundation or large language models to become an artificial intelligence powerhouse. Instead, leadership will come from how effectively the country adopts, adapts and scales existing systems, according to Navtez Bal, Vice President and General Manager, India and South Asia at Red Hat.
“India will become one of the biggest users of AI in the world. There is no doubt about it,” Bal said.
He argued that India’s strength lies in refining available models rather than creating them from scratch. “India will do a much better job in taking the large language models which exist and actually tweaking and distilling them for our own usage, so that we have more fit-for-purpose models.”
Long-term differentiation, he added, will depend on execution. “It’ll be on who uses models more effectively. That’s where the differentiation will lie.”
As sovereign AI gains traction, Bal warned against dependence on proprietary ecosystems. Open-source platforms, he said, provide the control governments and enterprises need. “If you are a sovereign AI-focused company, then you need a solution that belongs to you and is not locked in… data remains within India, controls remain within India, the control on source code remains within India.”
Red Hat, built on Linux and OpenShift, positions itself as an alternative to hyperscaler-led stacks and counts enterprises across sectors among its users.
Bal also predicted a structural shift in operations. “Pretty much every process has to be rethought,” he said, urging organisations to accelerate transformation to stay competitive.
