A fresh debate over India’s artificial intelligence ambitions has erupted after a senior Amazon Web Services executive publicly criticised Infosys co-founders Nandan Nilekani and N R Narayana Murthy, calling their ideas on Artificial Intelligence “outdated” and arguing that India needs “more Vishal Sikkas.”

The remarks came from Girish Dilip Patil, AWS Singapore’s head of technology for generative AI, who reacted sharply to Nilekani’s recent argument that India should prioritise applying AI at scale rather than attempting to build the world’s most advanced foundational models.

Patil said the country risked remaining trapped in a services-led technology mindset if it continued to focus only on AI adoption rather than AI creation. According to him, the approach that helped India dominate global IT outsourcing in the 1990s and 2000s may no longer be enough in the era of artificial intelligence.

Trigger behind the debate

The controversy stems from an opinion piece by Nilekani and former Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan, where they argued that India’s AI opportunity lies in widespread deployment rather than competing head-on with the US or China in building cutting-edge foundational AI models.

Nilekani has repeatedly pointed to India’s success with digital public infrastructure such as Aadhaar, UPI and India Stack as proof that the country’s strength lies in applying technology at massive scale. The argument is that India can create outsized economic value by using AI to improve productivity in healthcare, education, agriculture and governance, instead of spending billions chasing frontier AI supremacy.

Patil, however, pushed back strongly against that vision.

Calling Nilekani’s thinking rooted in an “IT services sales guy mindset,” the AWS executive argued that India should instead nurture more deep-tech innovators and AI researchers capable of building globally competitive technology products. He singled out former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka as an example of the kind of leadership India needs for the AI age.

Why Vishal Sikka became central to the argument

Sikka occupies a unique place in India’s technology history. Brought into Infosys in 2014 after a long stint at SAP, he represented a shift away from traditional outsourcing-led growth toward automation, software platforms and AI-driven transformation.

His tenure at Infosys was marked by efforts to reposition the company beyond labour-intensive services. But his strategy also triggered friction within the company and eventually ended in his resignation in 2017 amid governance disputes involving Infosys founders.

For many in the Indian tech ecosystem, Sikka symbolised an attempt to move Indian IT from cost arbitrage to innovation-led leadership. Patil’s remarks appear to revive that older ideological divide inside India’s technology sector — whether the future belongs to large-scale service deployment or original product and AI research.