Speaking at the Economic Times World Leaders Forum (ET WLF) 2026, Irina Ghose, Managing Director of Anthropic India, urged corporate leaders to shift away from basic chatbot experimentation and begin building production-grade AI solutions to solve complex business challenges.
Key Takeaways from ET WLF 2026
-
Move Beyond Chatbot Testing: Ghose advised CEOs to identify their most complex operational pain points and deploy dedicated task forces to build custom AI workflows rather than merely prompting conversational tools.
-
Anthropic’s Growing Footprint in India:
-
Banking & Finance: Partnering with Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank to boost engineering productivity, and collaborating with NPCI on agentic AI solutions.
-
IT & Systems Integrators: Working closely with IT majors like TCS and Infosys to scale enterprise implementations.
-
Social Sector & Science: Collaborating with IISc on antivenom research and working with Digital Green on multilingual AI tools for farmers.
-
-
Data Sovereignty & Local Compute: Local data residency and domestic inference capabilities will be crucial for unlocking AI adoption across heavily regulated sectors like banking, insurance, and healthcare.
-
Economic Value vs. Realized Impact: While McKinsey estimates AI’s global economic potential at $4.4 trillion—with Indian firms spending ~$2.6–$2.8 billion—analysts noted that 80–90% of companies have yet to realize significant value due to a lack of workflow redesign and change management.
