On the AIM 100 list, and what I think it actually signals

Analytics India Magazine published its 2025 list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in India yesterday. I am on it.

I was pleased, obviously. Once that wore off a little, I found myself reading the list as a record of how Indian AI has changed rather than as a ranking of individuals.

A few things on my mind reading the list, none of them about me.

Look at who is on it now and who would not have been there three years ago. In 2022, Indian AI was a list of model trainers, MLOps engineers, and a handful of academic labs. In 2025, it includes founders building in agriculture, healthcare, law, education, financial services, and manufacturing. I think the move from horizontal AI to vertical AI is one of the most consequential changes in Indian technology this decade. The list catches that change in progress.

It is also heavier on builders than commentators. A few years ago an AI list in India would have been dominated by people who wrote influentially about AI without having shipped a system that anyone used. Now the share has flipped. Good.

The personal bit is harder to fit into a list. Dhenu and KissanAI exist because Lokesh Desai built and led the engineering. Chintan Papaiya is on a flight every week to a state capital, trying to put agriculture AI in the hands of agribusiness teams that have never used a domain model before. Sachi Desai has been the sharpest outside voice on the commercial side since before this stopped being a side project, and Ryan Gilbert brought decades of agronomy experience to our US extension research when he had every reason to stay where he was. The agronomists, extension officers, FPO heads, and partner organisations did the unglamorous work of telling us when we were wrong. A list has room for one name. The work did not happen that way.

Thank you to Amit Raja Naik and Merin Susan John at AIM for the editorial work, to the people who quietly nominated, and to my family for putting up with the parts of this work that came out of weekends.

The full list is on Analytics India Magazine’s site. Back to it on Monday morning.