On the sidelines of the recently concluded Data + AI Summit, Databricks India and SAARC region vice president Anil Bhasin spoke about India leading AI innovation and building products for the world.
“I believe, in the next decade, our country will lead the AI initiatives for the world. I’m a hardcore Indian and believe in the power of India,” Bhasin told AIM in an exclusive interview. He added that Indian customers are innovating fast and Databricks is excited to work with them.
He explained that it’s difficult to find the scale, size, and complexity of India anywhere else, so solving India’s toughest challenges becomes a template for the world.
Databricks’ Deepens Commitment to the Indian Market
Bhasin mentioned that Databricks is ambitious about transforming India into the world’s first data AI-driven economy.
Databricks has many partnerships in India and Bhasin emphasised that the company doesn’t perceive itself as just a technology vendor but as a strategic partner, always striving to think ahead for the customers by sharing all the latest trends, best practices, knowledge, and innovation in the AI industry.
He said that the biggest value differentiator for Databricks is having an extensible platform with all built-in capabilities required from ingestion to serving. Additionally, the platform being open source and having an added layer of governance allows everybody to democratise AI in a big way.
Databricks recently announced a growth of over 80% in its India business over the past two fiscal years, fueled by the rising demand for data and AI capabilities among Indian enterprises from all industries, including FSI, retail, manufacturing, and digital natives.
Indian customers such as Air India, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd, CommerceIQ, Freshworks, InMobi, Meesho, Myntra, Parle, UPL, and many others are leveraging the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to boost business innovation, optimise operations, and enhance decision-making.
Recently, Krutrim, the AI company founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, also announced its partnership with Databricks to pre-train and fine-tune its foundational model and develop GenAI models tailored for the Indian market.
Krutrim recently launched Krutrim-7B-chat, an LLM trained in 10 Indian languages, available on Databricks Marketplace. Infosys also partnered with Databricks to leverage the latter’s unified data analytics platform with Infosys’ AI-first offering, Infosys Topaz.
Shorthills AI also recently announced their strategic alliance with Databricks to improve business operations through the integration of AI and data analytics. The company has also invested in Aravind Srinivas’ AI chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine Perplexity AI.
On a Mission to Help Companies Embrace AI
At the summit, Databricks also announced a host of new GenAI capabilities and a major push to its open-source strategy.
The new offerings, such as Mosaic AI Model Training, Mosaic AI for RAG, and Mosaic AI Gateway, in addition to open-sourcing their Unity Catalog, aim to help enterprises build high-quality, domain-specific AI applications.
A pioneer in Lakehouse, and now having acquired Tabular, Databricks seems to be trying to build this pendrive or USB port of sorts that can be plugged into AI systems in the future — achieving 100% interoperability.
The idea is to let users own their data, removing lock-in, reducing the cost, and also letting users get many more use cases by giving them the choice to use different engines for different purposes.
NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang also appreciated the open source initiatives by Databricks, talking about how the open source AI movement has made it possible for every company to be an AI company.
Databricks also launched a new Learning Festival, which will train practitioners and provide them with more hands-on training and certification.
Bhasin further said that Databricks is the only company on the planet that provides community training, learning enablement, and driving thought leadership at scale. “The fact that we want to build a CIO community around data in itself is a great value proposition,” he said.
India being an open source AI champion, and from young developers to companies leveraging open source models to build exciting products for the world, the various capabilities and features offered by Databricks would be a good kickstart for the Indian developer community.
Even Jensen Huang agrees!
When asked about how customers and organisations can get started with AI today, the NVIDIA chief said, “I think the Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform (DIP) is incredible. It has made it easy for people to manage their data and extract information. So, the best way to start is to come to Databricks.”
