From AI models to agents: Sarvam’s Kumar, Emergent’s Jha map India’s next five years

New business data points to the fact that India could become the world’s largest user of artificial intelligence over the next five years, but the cost of using the technology will have to decline as adoption expands, Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar stated in conversation with Nalin Mehta, Managing Editor of Moneycontrol, at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave 2026.

“Five years down the line, India would be the largest user of AI,” Kumar stated during a session titled India’s AI Unicorns: Models, Moats & the Race to Scale.

“Reducing cost of AI would be a critical component,” he stated.

Kumar described the current phase as “year one for India AI” and stated the country should accelerate the pace at which it develops and adopts the technology.

Sarvam, he stated, was the first firm to launch a large language model built from scratch for India. The firm in March released its 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models as open source, saying both had been trained from scratch in India.

Kumar pointed to document processing as one example of AI already being deployed at scale. Around four crore LIC forms are being digitised using custom models, he stated.

AI agents could become biggest use case, says Jha

Emergent founder Mukund Jha, who joined Kumar on the panel, stated persistent AI agents that continuously work for customers could emerge as the biggest use case for the technology.

“Persistent AI agents working for customers is going to emerge as the largest use case,” Jha stated.

As agents become better at coordinating tasks, Jha stated more of the work done by people could shift towards planning and strategy.

Emergent has been moving further into agent-based products this year. In April, the firm rolled out Wingman, an autonomous agent designed to operate in the background and carry out tasks across messaging and workplace applications.

More recently, Jha stated Emergent was expanding beyond helping users build software towards automating functions for small businesses. More than half of its team is working on its core agent technology, with agents being tested for tasks including cash-flow analysis, scheduling and social media management, he told The Economic Times earlier this month.

“Our business is moving really fast,” Jha stated at the Moneycontrol conclave, adding that Emergent was seeing success with its small-business platform.

“We are going heavy on open source,” he further noted.

Emergent boosted $130 million in a Series C round in July at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. Jha told TechCrunch at the time that the firm had crossed $120 million in annual run-rate topline and had more than 200,000 paying customers.

Sarvam expands from models to infrastructure

Kumar, in the meantime, stated Sarvam had spent much of the past two quarters building out the infrastructure required to run AI models.

“Now we can host our models, others’ models,” he stated. “We can now host American models on our infra.”

The firm is additionally deploying engineering talent alongside its infrastructure to help customers build AI products, Kumar stated.

“Our success comes from the ability to build value for Indian enterprises,” he stated.

Sarvam boosted $234 million in June in the first close of a scheduled $300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. The firm stated the funding would backing model research, access to computing capacity and deployments across enterprises and government.