The US innovates. China industrializes. Can India deploy at scale and claim its right to win in AI? India’s edge has always been its people: engineers, data, and scale. But as LLMs automate language and logic, can that advantage still hold? In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Chandrashekhar Venugopal speaks with Avnish Bajaj and Vikram Vaidyanathan about India’s crossroads in the AI race and what will define the country’s next decade. The trio unpacks: The rise of Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs): India’s secret weapon in AI deployment How data, assurance, and governance could become India’s strongest moat Why AI might finally flip India from back office to frontline How voice and vernacular interfaces could erase the digital divide And what government, investors, and founders must do to spark India’s inference leap With Aadhaar, UPI, and consent layers powering population-scale systems, India has the infrastructure and now the opportunity to lead the world by deploying intelligence at scale.