India’s moat in the global economy of AI, Robotics, and Industrial IoT

Is the world ready for largescale robotics coexisting with humans? What is the biggest challenge in scaling a robotics company? Is there really hope for consumer IoT? Get answers to these and many more questions in a discussion on ‘AI in the Physical World’ by experts in the field: Avataar’s AI & Robotics Advisor Sridhar Solur, MVF Partners’ Karthee Madasamy, Infinite Uptime’s Raunak Bhinge, and Chef Robotics Rajat Bhageria.

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Artificial intelligence and tech innovations have moved from office discussions into our daily lives faster than we realize. The real sign of tech innovations seamlessly blending in our lives is when they are no longer identified by their acronym monikers of the tech world, according to Karthee Madasamy, Founding Managing Partner, MFV Partners, a deep-tech fund based in San Francisco, US. 

“I think when a technology really becomes adopted, nobody knows which form it happens in. When you're talking in acronyms, it means it's still in the technology domain and not really talking about use cases. When you talk about the physical world, we already have a bunch of stuff at home like the connected thermostat and camera – we just don't call it the Internet of Things (IoT),” he said, speaking at the Annual General Meeting of Avataar Venture Partners in Bengaluru. 

However, unlike consumer IoT making homes and living spaces smarter, Pune-based Infinite Uptime’s Founder and CEO Raunak Bhinge believes industrial IoT solves a much bigger pain point and has the ability to tap a bigger value creation and opportunity.  

The industrial IoT market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.90% to reach $28.15 Bn by ​2033​, according to research by IMARC Group. It had a market size of $9.40 Bn in 2024.

“It's a very land-and-expand market. When you deploy in a large manufacturing environment, if you prove it in one section of a plant and scale it to the entire plant or all other facilities, it starts becoming automatic and that's where the real difference is,” Raunak said.  

Beyond justifying business use cases for B2B clients, it should be impactful enough to generate reasonable Return on Investment (RoI) for adoption to speed up.   

Real-world application also differs from tech to tech and the market sectors or areas of life in which it needs to be deployed. 

Towards purpose-specific tech

Rajat Bhageria is a roboticist and entrepreneur deploying artificial intelligence and robotics in the highly labour-intensive food industry through his California-based startup Chef Robotics, which leverages AI to help food companies increase production volume. 

He explained that there’s also the “chicken and egg problem” between lack of data and the need to deliver something useful and that actually making tech work in the food industry can be far more random.  

“If you think about the internet and cloud, things are relatively deterministic. If you have some function with some inputs, you'll get an output. It's relatively deterministic. I think the real world and physics is a lot more non-deterministic, more random,” Rajat said.  

In the food industry, he explained, the tech needs to work out many variants like the different ways food is cut and cooked, different preferences and diet of every customer and country. 

As far as robotics is concerned, Rajat believes the innovations will evolve to perform highly specific tasks. For instance, he said ‘walk around robots’ or humanoids are not necessary for all industries such as food assembly and packaging where stationary robots can get the job done.    

A passionate roboticist, Rajat believes the world will have “tens of billions of specific-purpose robots and billions of humanoids in 20 years.” 

“For the founders and investors, who are willing to underwrite a long time horizon, I think it (robotics) is potentially one of the biggest markets ever. It's just how long a time horizon you are willing to underwrite,” he added. 

When it comes to the big picture in the tech economy, Raunak maintains that India has a massive advantage, thanks to quality and quantity of labour available in the Indian market and the evolution from pure Software-as-a-service to Outcome-as-a-service – which uses AI to provide specific outcomes. 

“As AI is making software products appear more and more similar, the next most important thing from differentiation is service. That's where India is going to play a big role,” Raunak added.

Watch the full discussion here:

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