Nikhil Malhotra | Tech Mahindra

Author Profile

Nikhil Malhotra

Chief Innovation Officer & Global Head – AI, Tech Mahindra

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Nikhil has been a researcher all his life and is now leading the growth of AI and Quantum Computing research within Tech Mahindra. His area of business research is how quantum Computing, AI, and neuroscience would inspire the growth of AI and the next change in society, business, and humanity. He has won numerous awards, including the 2020, 2021, and 2023 Innovation Congress awards, for being the most innovative leader in India.

Nikhil is also a TEDx speaker and the author of a best-seller book – Courage, the Journey of an Innovator. One of his long-standing visions has been to enable machines to talk in the local Indian dialects. Most notably, he has spearheaded Project Indus, Tech Mahindra's seminal effort to build Indic LLM (homegrown large language model), which was successfully launched globally in June 2024.

Nikhil holds a master's degree in computing with a specialization in distributed computing from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, and is an avid physicist.

Insights

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The AI world is a buzz with rapid transformations. When agentic AI started becoming more prominent, the world had barely begun to understand large language models (LLMs) and their manifestations in Small Language Models (SLMs) or domain-specific models. This emerging paradigm promises to be the next evolution in AI, providing reasoning capabilities and autonomous systems that can drive meaningful outcomes.

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NVIDIA GTC 2025 sent a clear signal: Agentic AI is the next major wave, set to disrupt the services industry. For years, businesses operated under a people-first model, scaling teams to drive growth. But that era is ending. Silicon Valley is already transitioning to this next phase.

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An era where every board meeting starts and ends with a discussion on LLMs and gen AI is upon us. It’s become beyond a buzzword, and there is a one-upmanship frenzy. This frenzy started with GPT-based models in 2023 when OpenAI made its announcement, and now we are staring at another one, DeepSeek. Each new model claims to be better than the other, to have solved human-like reasoning in machines, and to be closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The truth, however, may be much farther.