Google Cloud brings together India Inc. visionaries to define the Agentic AI future
Google Cloud concluded its Leaders Connect India 2026 series, a three-city event across Mumbai (May 25), Delhi (May 27), and Bengaluru (May 29), uniting senior executives from BFSI, consumer goods, aviation, digital commerce, ad-tech, and travel to address a single urgent question – how does India move from AI experimentation to AI-driven economic extraction, and how fast?
The overarching theme across all three cities was what Google Cloud termed the Economic Outcome Mandate. The boardroom, leaders were told, has stopped asking what an AI model can do. It is now demanding a clear, measurable path from AI investment to competitive advantage, through cost optimization, customer retention, and net-new revenue generation. The era of isolated POCs has been deemed as being over and widespread adoption across verticals is the next step in this AI journey.
“We are already in the agentic era, and what is non-negotiable now is clear business outcomes and economic value attached to every AI deployment,” said Sashikumar Sreedharan, Managing Director, Google Cloud India. He added, “The challenge is to keep the best of the cloud and the best of the sovereign together. Technology today allows you to do exactly that. Products like Google Distributed Cloud bring the best of cloud flexibility and scalability to a customer’s own premises. Those needs are coming up more and more, and it’s a journey we are very much on with our customers.” He stressed that less complex tasks can be easily handed to AI agents so that the human capital can focus on the strategic elements of the business.
Mumbai, May 25
Mumbai opened the first leg of the Leaders Connect 2026 with a focus on how agentic AI enables large enterprises to expand their capacity to serve, not just reduce cost. Panelists from McKinsey and the consumer goods sector explored how India’s heterogeneous market, where language, palate, and purchasing power shift every 100 kilometres, demands hyper-localisation at a scale that is now architecturally possible. Where enterprise strategy once segmented India into a dozen macro clusters, agentic AI makes it conceivable to serve hundreds of thousands of micro-clusters with customised assortments, responsive supply chains, and personalised marketing.
The panel also addressed risk and governance, advocating a tiered deployment model, from lower-stakes summarisation and contract review, through accounts reconciliation, and carefully toward strategic financial functions. The ability of AI systems to explain and enforce human-in-the-loop controls, were identified as non-negotiable prerequisites for enterprise adoption at scale.
Delhi, May 27
Delhi drew one of the series’ most cross-sectoral conversations, with perspectives from aviation, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Boston Consulting Group, and Akasa Air. The discussion moved decisively from cost reduction to value creation: aviation panellists highlighted billions of dollars being lost globally each year to irregular operations, and how agentic AI, reasoning simultaneously across weather, crew schedules, passenger connections, and maintenance constraints, could recapture that loss, optimizing capacity, without adding a single aircraft.
On digital commerce, panellists examined the scale of India’s untapped opportunity: 90 million sellers and 1.4 billion consumers, yet only 4–5% of sellers and 10–15% of consumers are active on digital platforms today. Reducing the cost of coordination between buyers and sellers, and extending trust at population scale through shared AI infrastructure, was identified as the defining design challenge for India’s next phase of digital growth. The panel closed with a cultural call to action and that organisations must reframe AI not as a threat to roles, but as an amplifier of human capability and a driver of specialisation.
Bengaluru, May 29
Bengaluru brought the series to a close with a conversation anchored in the realities of building AI at genuine scale. Panellists from MakeMyTrip and InMobi Group examined the economics of large-scale AI inference, the architectural challenge of serving India’s vernacular diversity, and the bottlenecks that will define the next 12 months. A key consensus: with only 15–20% of India comfortable in English, voice is not a feature, it is the primary interface for the majority of this country, and the maturity of voice models in Indian languages remains the most critical infrastructure gap to close.
The Bengaluru panel also examined context retention across long conversational flows, privacy-as-architecture, and the cost-per-token equation that must improve significantly before AI reaches its true potential across Asia’s vast user base. The closing message highlighted that India’s technology leaders are not waiting for permission to move and architectural decisions made today will determine competitive position for the decade ahead.
Agentic AI in Action
Underscoring the real-world momentum behind these conversations, Google Cloud and Meesho announced a strategic partnership on May 26, to build a high-performance digital foundation for Meesho’s next phase of growth. The partnership is already demonstrating the economic outcomes Leaders Connect set out to define. Meesho’s generative AI shopping assistant Vaani, built with Google’s Gemini models, has seen over 1.5 million users in its debut month, with early data showing a 22% higher conversion rate among users engaging with the tool, a direct translation of agentic AI capability into measurable business value at Bharat scale.
Across all three cities, enterprise conversations were anchored in national ambition, India’s trillion-dollar digital economy target and the Viksit Bharat aspiration of a 30 trillion dollar economy by 2047. Agentic AI, leaders agreed, is not an IT infrastructure upgrade. It is a strategic investment that accelerates innovation, creates unprecedented structural efficiency, and positions India to lead where it has natural, decisive advantage.
