Deepening our commitment to India’s AI ambition - blog.google

Deepening our commitment to India’s AI ambition

While building increasingly helpful and powerful AI, we have been guided by one key principle: the ultimate metric of AI’s progress isn't just the size of model parameters, but also how people use this technology to drive positive transformation. At Google I/O Connect India 2026, we announced new initiatives and partnerships that demonstrate this commitment while bringing our latest advances to accelerate India’s AI ambition.

Empowering India’s learners and educators with frontier AI

Google DeepMind is bringing its rigorous AI Research Foundations curriculum to strengthen India’s premier AI talent. This free 56-hour program aims to help empower India’s students and AI builders to lead the nation's AI ambitions from the front while fueling a global, India-originated AI-ready workforce. The program will help its learners build and fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs), and drive high-impact AI research. Learners can earn industry-recognized Google Cloud Skill badges and certificates upon completion.

Globally, the curriculum has had over 38,000 enrollments, with learners reporting it supported their professional development.

Higher education institutions and industry organizations can incorporate AIRF into their own programs, tracking learner progress on Google Skills. IISc Bangalore has already started, while NASSCOM will also make AIRF available on Future Skills Prime.

The curriculum's deployment is made possible, in part, via the Google.org AI Opportunity Fund in Asia-Pacific. Under this initiative, Google.org is supporting AVPN, a network of social investors, to scale world-class, research-backed education resources—including AIRF—across the region. In India, AVPN will work alongside local partners to deliver the training safely and effectively, creating a multiplier effect for learners across the country.

AI Research Foundations - a curriculum by Google DeepMind

To further support educators nurturing India’s future AI leaders, we are deepening our collaboration with the Atal Innovation Mission and launching the ATL Saathi. This desktop web application gives teachers a Gemini-powered assistant to help deliver the Atal Tinkering Labs’ curriculum and curate hands-on experiments for young tinkerers. ATL Saathi is being rolled out to 100 schools this year, with an aim to eventually reach 10,000 schools with Atal Tinkering Labs.

ATL Saathi supporting the Atal Innovation Mission

Strengthening Indian healthcare with open-sourced AI

India’s flagship medical institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), is expanding their use of our multimodal MedGemma open models to address more India-specific health challenges.

Building on successful AI-powered applications for dermatology and OPD triaging, AIIMS researchers are now developing new models for leprosy and sexual and reproductive health. These will help patients and healthcare professionals identify and manage conditions based on images and text inputs. AIIMS will make these localized clinical health models available to the Indian developer ecosystem.

IndusDerma application, powered by Google’s MedGemma model

We are also encouraged to see our open models increasingly contributing to India’s Digital Public Infrastructure for healthcare. Recently, the National Health Authority used Gemma 4 and our open sourced Medical Data Toolkit to build Aarogya Setu 2.0, India’s new public health record app.

Bringing Gemini to more Indic language speakers

Our language expansion efforts remain rooted in enabling AI to meet the diverse needs of people across the country. These include building on our research collaborations, such as with our collaboration with IISc-Bangalore, Project Vaani. After completing two phases, Project Vaani has now open-sourced speech and image datasets for 109 Indic languages to support inclusive AI development.

In our latest measure, we are now expanding the capabilities of Gemini Live. Gemini Live now has the ability to converse naturally in over 25 Indian languages and dialects, in voice and text — including Sanskrit, Bhojpuri, Maithili and many more. We are excited for the possibilities this unlocks for even more people across the country.

Gemini Live now supports over 25 Indian languages and dialects

Building world-class AI in India

To accelerate Indian innovation, we’re localizing our cutting-edge AI tools to deliver the strict data residency and sovereign controls regulated industries need for building with full control.

Indian enterprises including regulated industries and the public sector can now run Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud from within Indian data centres. This allows enterprises and public sector organisations to deploy advanced generative AI without prompts, model weights or outputs leaving their perimeter. This removes the trade-off Indian organisations face: using frontier AI while meeting compliance obligations. All supporting services will run fully disconnected from the public internet, providing a ‘physical airlock’ that will mitigate the risk of external data breaches.

We also expanded our commitment to India’s digital sovereignty by making Gemini 3.5 Flash available to Indian enterprises and startups via the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and the Gemini Enterprise app. Starting now, this model will be available with strict in-country machine learning processing commitments. .

We are incredibly proud to partner with India’s ecosystem, and can't wait to see how today’s announcements help open a new chapter in the country’s journey towards global AI leadership.