The Morning Brief

Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM known for steering its shift to software, hybrid cloud and quantum investments, joins to cut through AI hype. He discusses AI’s role in transforming IT services and consulting. He outlines India’s path to sovereign AI and balances local infrastructure with global cloud. He also sets expectations for quantum commercialization and near‑term tech spending.

Bipin Sapra, tax partner and global trade expert at EY India, explains shifting US tariff powers and what they mean for India. He outlines the Supreme Court ruling, compares different US trade authorities, and discusses the uncertainty around a proposed 18% tariff and its impact on tax, transfer pricing and corporate margins. He recommends waiting for clearer legal direction before signing any deal.

Dilip Shanghvi, Chairman of Sun Pharma, built a pharma giant from focused therapy bets. Glenn Saldanha, Managing Director of Glenmark, pushed decades of innovation into landmark deals. They unpack growth from neglected therapy areas. They discuss shifting from generics to novel assets, clinical trial and policy reforms, talent return, attracting global R&D, and AI speeding drug discovery.

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, a Paris startup building open-weight LLMs to decentralize AI. He discusses why US concentration gives geopolitical leverage. He champions open models, sovereign cloud partnerships and local compute to redistribute innovation. He outlines Mistral’s India strategy, local hiring and infrastructure-minded discipline to keep AI accessible and competitive.

Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks and cybersecurity veteran, discusses securing AI-native organisations amid rising agent risks. He covers the need for agent registries and real-time breach detection, argues for a hybrid sovereign AI approach for India, and urges entrepreneurs to build problem-solving security tools rather than features.

Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist and entrepreneur focused on frontier tech and AI, makes a bold case for AI delivering free personal doctors, PhD-level agronomists and world-class tutors to every Indian. He forecasts huge productivity gains alongside disruptive politics in the 2030s, urges Indian firms to pivot from old IT models, and lays out a 2047 vision to end survival work and uplift the bottom half.

Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President who leads the company’s global legal and policy work, discusses Microsoft’s $17B India commitment. He covers infrastructure and skilling investments. He talks about the north–south digital divide. He outlines digital sovereignty, privacy-focused regulation and the need for international collaboration on AI.

Disha Acharya, a startup and tech reporter tracking generative AI, and Puran Choudhary, a technology reporter focused on AI and developer ecosystems, discuss Anthropic’s India strategy. They cover its enterprise-first timing, partnerships with IT firms, focus on Indic language support, developer outreach like hackathons, and whether India is an innovation lab or a data source.

David Zapolsky, Amazon’s Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer, explains the company’s India play — from massive data center builds in Hyderabad and Mumbai to AWS services and model access. He discusses tax certainty shaping hyperscaler bets, pragmatic Indian privacy rules and cross-border data resilience. The conversation also touches on geopolitics, quick commerce and practical, agentic AI use cases.

Woochong Um, CEO of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, leads clean energy financing and pilot projects like utility‑scale battery storage in India. He discusses India as a testing ground for large-scale storage, the Kilokari battery pilot that cut blackouts, scaling storage across states and countries, AI‑enabled digitized grids, and how coordinated public‑private action can unlock jobs and reliable power.