Akamai Summit: AI Innovation at India’s Scale
Key Highlights
Akamai Summit highlights AI deployment challenges in India, focusing on cost innovation, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Key insights from Akamai and NVIDIA.
The Akamai Digital Leadership Summit in Bengaluru addressed the challenges of deploying AI in India, focusing on cost-effectiveness and infrastructure demands. Key discussions revolved around inference costs, voice AI, API security, and sovereign models.
Sumant Narayanan, Akamai’s Regional Director for India and SAARC, emphasized the shift from developing large foundation models to practical enterprise applications. He also noted the increased cybersecurity risks associated with AI tools.
Akamai CTO Dr. Robert Blumofe cautioned against relying solely on LLMs and highlighted the importance of diverse deep learning methods. He mentioned Akamai’s partnership with NVIDIA, utilizing RTX Pro 6000 GPUs for distributed inference.
NVIDIA’s Jigar Halani argued that India’s AI challenge differs from the West, focusing on delivering services at scale with minimal transaction costs. He cited examples like the Bhashini platform and AI-driven fraud detection systems.
A panel moderated by Akamai’s Hrishikesh Varma discussed scaling AI in different organizations. Reliance Jio’s Sanath Moguluri addressed latency challenges in voice AI, while Eloelo’s Sagar Gaonkar described live content moderation strategies. Postman’s Pranav Tiwari noted the transformation of connectivity through agentic AI.
InMobi and GlanceAI Co-Founder Mohit Saxena discussed cost reduction strategies for AI in India, emphasizing the need to re-engineer products for price-sensitive markets. He noted that while AI has reduced the bar for average engineers, it has raised the bar for good engineers.
Meesho’s Kiran Kumar Katreddi highlighted the engineering constraints of serving over 200 million users in Tier-III and Tier-IV towns, leading to the development of their own Bharat ML stack.
Akamai’s Vijay Kolli discussed the expanding attack surface due to AI systems, with API growth increasing exponentially. KreditBee’s Mukesh Solanki and Zoho Corp’s Sujatha Iyer covered security considerations, emphasizing the need for explainable models and proactive security measures.
Gnani.ai CEO Ganesh Gopalan advocated for sovereign AI, emphasizing the importance of owning every layer of the voice stack to protect customer data and improve experiences.
The summit highlighted that the next phase of AI adoption depends on engineering discipline and the ability to run systems reliably in the real world, especially in cost-sensitive markets like India.