Move over IT services: AI is India’s new trillion-dollar bet, declares Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen

At the inaugural World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit (WAVES) 2025, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked about the transformative role artificial intelligence (AI) is playing in reshaping India’s creative economy and outlined how AI will be central to the country’s next phase of growth.

“Every disruptive technology—from the PC, web, mobile, to cloud computing, social and now artificial intelligence—has expanded the scope of human imagination and productivity,” Narayen said during his keynote. “We believe that AI is accelerating and expanding the creative aperture even further across ideation, creation and production.”

Citing India’s rapid adoption of digital tools and infrastructure, Narayen said the country has emerged as a global incubator, leading the way in mobile, digital payments, and increasingly, artificial intelligence. “It’s fair to say that India's next growth as an economy will not be in software code,” he said, adding that the size and breadth of the creative opportunity AI unlocks is unmatched.

According to Narayen, generative AI is helping Indian creators overcome the fear of the blank canvas, enabling them to build culturally rich and personalised content at scale. “It allows Indian artists, designers and storytellers to focus on developing culturally rich concepts and ideas faster,” he said, pointing to the rise of hyper-localised content tailored to India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

He added that AI is already supporting industries such as cinema, marketing and design in meeting rising demand for content across platforms and formats.

Narayan also called attention to India’s potential across all four layers of the AI technology stack—data, models, agents, and applications. In fact, local large language models trained on Indian languages and datasets could offer a distinct competitive advantage. “By training models on Indian cultural, linguistic and historical data, we have an opportunity to create new forms of digital models,” he said.

Additionally, he pointed to India’s decades of expertise in customer support and sales, which could be repurposed to build autonomous agents and AI-driven workflows, giving a new edge to the country’s IT services and outsourcing industries.

Lastly, he also stressed that India also has the right opportunity to lead through ethical AI. “Our Firefly models have been designed to be ethical by design, with creator attribution and content credentials at their core,” he added.