New Delhi: At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2025, two of the most influential voices in artificial intelligence—Pushmeet Kohli, Vice President of Science and Strategic Initiatives at Google DeepMind, and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO for B2B Applications at OpenAI—shared insights on the evolving intersection of AI, science, and society, emphasizing India’s unique role in shaping global AI applications.

Science First: DeepMind’s Long-Term Vision

Pushmeet Kohli highlighted that DeepMind remains fundamentally a scientific organization, with breakthroughs in research at the core of its mission rather than immediate commercial returns. “The organization has science embedded in its DNA. We make progress in many scientific areas, and we have been fortunate to demonstrate AI’s potential in solving real-world problems such as protein structure prediction with AlphaFold,” Kohli said during the summit.

AlphaFold, which accurately predicts protein structures, has become a hallmark of AI’s transformational potential in healthcare and biology. According to Kohli, the system is being actively used by over 180,000 researchers and students in India alone, showcasing the country’s growing role in advancing cutting-edge science.

Unlike many AI companies oscillating between commercial products, chatbots, and subscription models, DeepMind remains committed to scientific pursuits that can reshape entire disciplines. Kohli emphasized that their focus is on projects with meaningful societal impact rather than incremental improvements: “AI must transform the way society does something. This is the foundation on which we build our initiatives.”

While the pressure to commercialize is ever-present within Alphabet, Kohli noted that successes like AlphaFold have given DeepMind more autonomy to pursue curiosity-driven research, even as the broader AI market is dominated by applications designed for revenue and immediate utility. He further added that countries like India, with large populations and pressing healthcare needs, will see accelerated adoption of AI technologies aimed at transforming health outcomes and drug discovery processes.

India as a Global AI Testbed

Srinivas Narayanan from OpenAI emphasized India’s strategic importance in AI development and deployment. “India is going to be central to how AI is deployed in the real world,” he said. “There is immense energy and excitement for AI here, with developers building applications not just for India, but for the world.”

Narayanan framed India as more than a market—it is a testing ground for AI solutions under real-world constraints. With 1.4 billion people, extreme diversity in income, language, and literacy levels, and rapidly evolving infrastructure, India offers a unique “stress test” environment. If AI can succeed here, it can succeed anywhere. This mirrors India’s historical ability to adopt technology at advanced stages, such as skipping landline phones to mobile networks or leapfrogging traditional banking with UPI’s transformative scale.

The practical deployment of AI in India aligns with OpenAI’s global strategy. The country presents both an enormous development talent pool and an opportunity to build a thriving ecosystem of developers and applications. Narayanan stressed the importance of cost-sensitive innovation, pointing to subscription-based offerings like ChatGPT Go, designed to make AI accessible to a broader segment of users. By encouraging local developers to build applications using OpenAI’s APIs, the company can simultaneously scale usage and revenue while ensuring practical solutions are created for complex challenges in education, healthcare, agriculture, and financial inclusion.

A Strategic Market with Global Impact

The statements by Kohli and Narayanan reveal a dual motive: a genuine focus on scientific advancement and societal impact, alongside strategic positioning to capture a rapidly growing market and developer ecosystem in India. Narayanan’s emphasis on real-world deployment reflects a shift in AI discourse—from hypothetical AGI and hype-driven discussions to tangible, measurable impact on communities and industries.

Both DeepMind and OpenAI see India not just as a beneficiary but as a critical contributor to AI’s future. Kohli’s work on AlphaFold illustrates that science-led AI can yield transformative global solutions, while Narayanan’s approach underscores India’s potential to accelerate adoption, refine applications under complex conditions, and generate scalable solutions.

The conversations at HTLS also hint at a broader competitive pattern among AI and tech giants. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are all aggressively investing in India, seeking not only market share but also regulatory influence and a strong foothold in local innovation ecosystems. While enthusiasm for India’s AI potential may be genuine, it is also strategically calculated, combining economic opportunity with practical problem-solving.

The Takeaway

The discussions by Kohli and Narayanan make clear that AI is evolving in two parallel tracks. One track focuses on high-impact scientific breakthroughs, exemplified by DeepMind’s work in biology and healthcare. The other prioritizes real-world deployment and ecosystem development, as illustrated by OpenAI’s initiatives in India. Together, these strategies reflect how AI can be both transformative and globally scalable, leveraging India’s unique position to test, refine, and amplify applications that have worldwide relevance.

As AI continues to reshape industries and societal functions, India’s role is increasingly central—not merely as a consumer market, but as a co-creator of AI solutions capable of addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges. For companies like DeepMind and OpenAI, the goal is clear: solve complex scientific problems, enable practical AI for millions, and position India at the forefront of the global AI revolution.