India AI Impact Summit 2026: ‘AI can make our students more effective’: Intel India’s Gokul V  Subramaniam on democratising AI

The conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) has now shifted from high-level corporate strategy to practical, local implementation. At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Gokul V Subramaniam, President, Intel India and Vice President of the Client Computing Group at Intel Corporation, sat down with Business Today to discuss how Intel is democratising AI for students and small businesses across India. 

Subramaniam envisions a future where AI isn’t a luxury but a standard tool that provides personalised, vernacular education to millions and streamlines operations for enterprises of all sizes.

Revolutionising education through D2M (Direct-2-Mobile) technology

Perhaps the most significant impact of Intel’s local engineering is in the education sector. With approximately “245 million students” in India, Subramaniam noted that technology must be “personalised, vernacular, and interactive” to be truly effective.

“By bringing more personalised education capabilities, AI can make our students more effective, so that you are able to teach them in a way that is actually catering to their level or their interest,” he said.

A key innovation discussed was Direct-to-Mobile (D2M) technology, developed in collaboration with Tejas Networks. 

This allows educational content to be streamed directly to smartphones and Intel laptops using terrestrial bands, similar to how Doordarshan operates, bypassing the need for expensive data plans or stable Wi-Fi in remote areas.

Subramaniam added that AI PCs would further enhance this by providing “real-time translation and transcription, so that it’s in a local language,” ensuring that English-centric content is accessible to all students regardless of their primary dialect.

Democratising AI for small businesses

One of the primary hurdles for small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India has been the perceived high cost of entry for AI. Subramaniam addressed this by highlighting Intel’s focus on heterogeneous compute, which allows AI to run efficiently on local devices rather than relying solely on expensive cloud infrastructure.

“One of the things that Intel does is heterogeneous compute, which means we have, for affordable AI… processors and compute capabilities that go in the data centre cloud, but also on the network edge and on the actual user device,” Subramaniam explained. 

For local retailers, this often takes the form of “AI in a box,” enabling local inferencing for tasks like language translation and transcription. “We have several solutions that we work with our partners to enable them on the processor, and that’s how we make it more affordable”.

A focus on ‘Applied’ Intelligence

Looking ahead to 2027, Subramaniam expects AI to transition from “proof of concepts” to “real usages at the hands of the users“. He emphasised that Intel’s largest engineering centre outside the US, located in India, is central to this mission.

“What would be great to see is every globally available content, available to Indian students in various languages… another thing is also to see how you can get a lot more of the healthcare SMB and agriculture verticals also using AI, in a way that’s making it more effective for them”.