Can AI Fuel Economic Inclusion, Especially for Small Businesses and Local Economies?

 All you got to know from the ongoing AI Summit discussions

Having observed the discussions and debates presented at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 held at the Bharat Mandapam, one overarching theme stood out for me: Artificial intelligence is no longer doomsday news for established corporations and massive entities. It is being channelled as an ultimate instrument of economic inclusion for SMBs, micro-businesses and mainstream economics.

Time and again, technological revolutions have favoured the powerful- those in possession of capital, infrastructure and marketing and distribution networks. But what I saw at this summit was a larger change of heart. The central message from policymakers, industry captains and international authorities was that the AI revolution has to reach the grassroots.

PM Modi was clear in his message about how India’s innovation VCs and entrepreneurs have to harness AI to serve the people. His phrase, ‘AI: people-centric’, requires us to mind the mindset wherein AI augments but does not place or displace us. With SMBs delivering about 28% of India’s GDP and 130 million people of employment, AI can only help productivity and not be a ‘job killer’. …”

The most inspiring part of the summit discussions was the focus on MSMEs. Today small businesses grapple with credit access, customer analytics, supply chains and scale. AI-enabled tools can redefine that:

• Predictive analytics for inventory and demand planning
• AI-led compliance and bookkeeping tools
• AI-powered customer service
• Personalised marketing at scale

All of these will be at a small retailer in a Tier-2 town, at a fraction of the cost of one in a Tier-1 metropolis, managing operations the way a huge enterprise would. Every office in NITI Aayog displayed current projects around AI skilling and responsible AI. It plans to scale AI skilling programmes further, build curriculum on AI into higher education and develop sector centres of excellence on AI in healthcare, agriculture and logistics, to name a few.

To put this into the perspective of my readers and followers: India processes billions of digital payments and transactions a month on these digital platforms. Layer AI intelligence on top of that network. Farmers get weather-led crop advice. Small manufacturers optimise production. Local artisans sell globally with AI-led language translation.

Industry executives pointed out that the AI economy has a potential of exploding at 25% CAGR, adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the Indian economy before the end of this decade. ‘The aims are not only on growth. We need an inclusive spread of that growth,’ they concluded.

One of the integral points repeatedly highlighted was “AI for All”. That phrase cannot remain a slogan. It must translate into three concrete actions:

1. Affordable Compute Access: Government-backed AI infrastructure to ensure startups and MSMEs are not priced out of innovation.
2. AI Literacy at Scale: Upskilling programmes for entrepreneurs, not just engineers. Business owners must understand how to deploy AI tools practically.
3. Responsible AI Governance: Clear guardrails to ensure fairness, transparency, and data protection so that trust remains intact.

As a person personally passionate about startups and wealth, I think of AI as a multiplier. But for multipliers to work, there needs to be a base to multiply across. For small businesses, the base is resilience, adaptability and learning appetite.

The summit also addressed concerns about job losses. My answer to what many global CEO colleagues said: AI is going to wipe out some repetitive jobs, but it will create new types of jobs altogether. From prompt engineering to model training, from data labelling to AI assurance, these are new fields of opportunity. The question is whether we train our workforce on them on time.

India has proven already that it can create scaled open data commons and publicly operated digital infrastructure. The task ahead is building AI data commons, multilingual models, and open AI infrastructure that foster innovation in small towns and beyond metro corridors. To clarify for my readers, the market movements and AI do not just mean for tech founders. It means for every business of retail, pharma, education, manufacturing, consulting and professional services. If you do not explore using it today, your productivity and global competitiveness will erode in 5 years flat.

Bringing policymakers, technologists, investors and entrepreneurs together at a single thought summit is proof of a strong thought alignment. Alignment leads to acceleration. And acceleration to inclusive economic growth. AI can be the accelerator of inclusive economic growth, but we have to move from conversation to action on it. The call for action is visible. The implementation roadmap is emerging. All of us: entrepreneurs and working professionals, have to now implement it. Leaders and entrepreneurs and working professionals have to now embrace, adopt and implement AI and drive it for the uplift of the economy. These will be a few years when those who feared it will cry about the existential and future threat to mankind. It is not doing that. The truth is that the only way mankind is ever going to ensure its own future is if we stop fearing AI and start understanding, implementing and using it responsibly for the good of mankind. And I believe that is the real opportunity that India and the world have before them.

 

By Gaurav Bhagat, Founder, Gaurav Bhagat Academy and Thought leader