Future of tech companies lies in AI models: Inmobi CEO
New Delhi: Power of technology companies is moving from software to AI models trained using proprietary data, a top official of India’s first unicorn InMobi, said. The comment from the firm comes at a time when the Indian government is backing open source models for the development of sovereign AI models, and there is debate around the future of the country’s IT firms.
“The future of technology companies is that the power is not as much in software anymore as it used to be. The power is moving into the proprietary models that you are basically training using proprietary data. So, even all the frontier models are commoditised. The value is in the models that have proprietary data,” Tewari said. He said India will have to create their proprietary vertical models for their own region on top of the frontier models.ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic Claude 3 are some of the leading frontier models on which several companies are using to provide AI-based services.
At the summit, Indian start-up Sarvam has unveiled a frontier model which positions itself as a competitor to other global frontier models. InMobi claims its mobile advertising services have a reach of 2 billion users across more than 150 countries and has developed its own agentic commerce system that operates across more than 100 million devices globally, including mobile lock screens and smart TVs. Any AI model needs a large user base to fine-tune and train itself. The larger the data sets involved, the better it becomes. Tewari said that there used to be an advantage earlier of internet technologies coming out from the West, but that advantage is gone.
“Now, it’s a level playing field. We can actually test products on a much larger number of consumers and then make them go global. That’s our big advantage. We can build products from here (India) and take them into enterprises globally. That advantage never existed before, and I think we have been able to essentially make that happen,” he said.
Tewari, during a presentation at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, said that Artificial intelligence could unlock over USD 3 trillion in incremental economic impact for India by 2047 by fundamentally reshaping how commerce functions.
“We are essentially trying to create commerce models that are trained on proprietary consumer data, which basically then trains those models and becomes different. The world is moving very rapidly. What you saw in the last two, three years is not even valid anymore,” Tewari said.
