Industrial Research Unit · Straits Institute for Applied AI
Applied AI in India
India's AI lands first on the machinery of a very large state — railway waitlist prediction, GST evasion detection, a skilling chatbot on WhatsApp — with the ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission behind it.
AI readiness
0.49
Rank 76 of 171 — IMF AI Preparedness Index
On the record
9
entries across 4 industries
National programme
2024
IndiaAI Mission — ₹10,372 crore
National programme
IndiaAI Mission
Announced 2024, ₹10,372 crore (~US$1.2bn). Its pillars are compute capacity, innovation centre, datasets platform, application development, FutureSkills, startup financing, safe and trusted AI.
Services 49.3% · Industry 25.2% · Agriculture 16.2% of gross value added — World Bank, 2025
Kind
Role
9 entries
Education & Training
4
A multilingual AI skilling chatbot runs on WhatsApp, and India has added its first AI-tool qualifications to the national skills framework.
RegulationEducation & TrainingIndia2026
India adds its first AI-tool qualifications to national framework
NCVET placed India's first AI skills qualifications on the National Skills Qualifications Framework in July 2026, recognising NIIT Foundation Awarding Body (Dual). The AI-tool pair are Fundamentals of Digital Productivity with AI Tools, NSQF Level 3, and Fundamentals of Data Management with AI Tools, NSQF Level 4.
India's IndiaAI Mission backs AI skilling with a $1.25 billion outlay
India's Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission in March 2024: ₹10,371.92 crore (about US$1.25 billion) over five years, with AI skilling among seven pillars. IndiaAI FutureSkills widens AI courses from undergraduate to PhD level and opens Data and AI Labs in Tier 2 and 3 cities.
India launches a multilingual AI skilling chatbot on WhatsApp
India's Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) launched the Skill India Assistant on 21 July 2025, a multilingual AI skilling chatbot on WhatsApp built on Meta's open-source Llama model. MSDE calls it the first large-scale open-source AI deployment in a national public skilling mission. By February 2026 its Skill India Digital Hub, run with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), counted 1.5 crore (about 15 million) candidates, 7,000 training providers and 68,000 employer and industry partners.
Only 41% of India's PMKVY-certified trainees were placed in jobs
India's supreme audit institution found skilling scheme placements for just 2.318 million, or 41%, of the 5.614 million candidates certified under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana's short-term training. The ministry itself blamed the weak job placement on roles picked without skill-gap analysis or market-demand assessment.
Indian Railways lifted waitlist-prediction accuracy from 53% to 94%, per the railways, and Andhra Pradesh has modelled GST evasion with AI.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorIndia15 Aug 2026
Indian Railways' AI lifts waitlist-prediction accuracy from 53% to 94%
Ministry of Railways / CRIS — India's Ministry of Railways, via its technology arm CRIS, has begun rolling out AI railway reservations to replace the 40-year-old Passenger Reservation System, including forecasts of whether waitlisted tickets will confirm. Indian Railways says the waitlist prediction, introduced earlier in 2026, lifted accuracy from 53% to 94%, unverified independently; about 88% of tickets are already booked digitally.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorIndia15 Aug 2026
Andhra Pradesh presents an AI model to detect GST evasion
Andhra Pradesh Commercial Taxes Dept — Andhra Pradesh's Commercial Taxes Department has put forward an AI/ML-driven GST model, AI tax evasion detection that also speeds refunds. It is pitched as a way to strengthen the state's GST administration.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorIndia11 May 2026
India's Supreme Court launches AI chatbot for court services
Supreme Court of India — The Supreme Court of India has launched Su-Sahayak, an AI court chatbot, alongside a 'One Case, One Data' integrated case management platform. Built by the National Informatics Centre with the Supreme Court Registry, the digital assistant offers court guidance, procedural help and access to judgments, orders, cause lists and case status.
The agriculture ministry has launched Bharat-VISTAAR, an AI advisory platform for farmers.
DeploymentAgriculture & FoodIndia17 Feb 2026
India launches AI advisory platform Bharat-VISTAAR for farmers
Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare — Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has launched Bharat-VISTAAR in Rajasthan, bringing real-time, personalised AI farm advisory to farmers. The multilingual platform had been announced in the Union Budget 2026-27.
IndiaFirst Life has embedded AI agents across underwriting and claims.
DeploymentFinance & InsuranceIndia27 Aug 2026
IndiaFirst Life embeds AI agents across underwriting and claims
IndiaFirst Life — IndiaFirst Life has chosen Salesforce Agentforce to place AI agents in insurance work across claims processing, customer service and new-business underwriting. The agents review KYC and medical documents, sort and answer service cases and check claims paperwork.
Every entry on this page is a named organisation putting AI to work in a real job, taken from the State of Applied AI record. Each one is traced to the report it came from and dated, and where a figure is the organisation’s own the entry says so rather than presenting it as an independent result. Readiness, ecosystem and policy figures, where shown, are attributed on the card to the body that published them.
The record is maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit of the Straits Institute for Applied AI: entries are added as they are found and verified, not on a schedule, and nothing is published without an open source behind it. It currently holds 1114 entries across 249 countries.