At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, policymakers, public sector leaders and technology builders convened to examine how India can translate AI momentum into outcomes that are visible at population scale. The session, titled AI for Everyone: Empowering People, Businesses, and Society, brought together perspectives from various sectors – governance, public safety, education, entrepreneurship and the information ecosystem – with a clear throughline: AI adoption must move from isolated experimentation to embedded, repeatable deployment that benefits citizens and businesses across geographies, not only large enterprises and metros.
Within this discussion, Sanjay Varnwal, Co-founder and CEO, Spyne, highlighted why India’s 63–65 million MSMEs represent the next decisive frontier for AI. He said: “India’s 63 million MSMEs are sitting on a massive opportunity for AI adoption. AI now makes it possible to solve real problems, like invoicing, payments, inventory and customer outreach – at scale and with efficiency. If we can deliver these solutions in a cost-optimised way, the MSME market represents an enormous untapped goldmine.”
According to Varnwal, AI changes the adoption curve by enabling more natural, accessible interfaces and more automated workflows, creating a credible pathway for MSMEs to adopt productivity tools without carrying enterprise-grade complexity. However, he emphasised that the market will not be unlocked through generic platforms. “Start-ups must design for India’s realities, particularly cost-efficiency and linguistic diversity, where MSMEs operate across dozens of languages and highly varied digital maturity levels,” he added.
