Power shifts to proprietary AI models: InMobi CEO

Metro India News | NEW DELHI

The future of technology companies will be driven less by traditional software and more by artificial intelligence models trained on proprietary data, InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari said at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.

Tewari noted that while frontier AI models are increasingly becoming commoditised, the real competitive advantage lies in building proprietary vertical models trained on exclusive datasets. “The power is moving into proprietary models that are trained using proprietary data. The value is in the models which have proprietary data,” he said.

He emphasised that India must build its own vertical AI models tailored to regional needs on top of global frontier systems such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude 3. His remarks come amid the Indian government’s push for open-source models to develop sovereign AI capabilities and ongoing debate over the future direction of the country’s IT industry. At the summit, Indian start-up Sarvam unveiled its own frontier model, positioning itself as a potential competitor to global players.

InMobi, India’s first unicorn, claims its mobile advertising platform reaches over 2 billion users across 150 countries. The company has also developed an agentic commerce system operating on more than 100 million devices, including mobile lock screens and smart TVs.

Tewari said AI models require large user bases for effective fine-tuning, and India’s scale provides a significant advantage. Unlike earlier internet eras dominated by the West, he said, India now operates on a level playing field and can test products at scale before taking them global.