AI can supercharge India's digital stack: Ashwini Vaishnaw

The potential of India's digital stack including Aadhaar, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), DigiLocker, can grow manifold with the application of artificial intelligence (AI), said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister of Electronics and IT.

"We have started using AI in our DPI layer - Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker and results have been phenomenal. In many of these DPI layers, we are actively using very focused small models, which are the state-of-the-art for solving a particular problem. The power of DPI actually can get multiplied 10x, 20x, 100x, if we use AI in it," Vaishnaw said at industry body Nasscom's annual Technology and Leadership Forum 2025 in Mumbai on Monday.

The combination of AI and DPI could be a big win for India which already has the basic layer of AI within the DPI - that is quality and quantity of training data, he said in conversation with Rajesh Nambiar, president, Nasscom.


"And in DPI, we have a very structured approach which will help us stand out in the coming months and years, because very rarely will you find a large public sector dataset availability. Very few countries will find that."

Vaishnaw highlighted that Japan has awarded a patent to the UPI architecture. "We are going to leverage that patent in what we are trying to do with the AI systems in India."

On regulations, the minister said that India is taking a unique techno-legal approach towards regulation rather than a tightening approach that Europe has.

"The big contribution that we have made in the global AI dialogue is that a simple legislation of whatever magnitude, whatever complexity, will not work. It has to be technology plus legislation. We must not let innovation be stifled by the heavy hand of regulation," he said. The government has handed a series of technical projects to universities and academia to address the security and safety concerns of AI such as privacy, deepfakes, bias etc, he added.