Changemakers 2024: Why Azim Premji Could be the AI Man of India

Last year, Azim Premji was hardly optimistic when he was asked if India could lead the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, even though he saw AI’s disruptive potential. During a media interaction, he said that while there would be huge disruptions driven by AI, it was too early to say if India would lead the race. “It’s too early. At this moment there are no leadership positions,” he said.

Within a year, Premji became one of the largest investors in AI in India and the world. Premji Invest, Azim Premji’s family-owned investment firm, that manages over $10bn for the tech mogul, has investments in at least 20 AI firms. A $50mn investment announcement in Paris-based AI start-up Poolside.ai recently made headlines.

Azim Premji was born in 1945, two years before Independence, in Bombay (now Mumbai). A Stanford alumnus, Premji was one of the leaders of India’s information technology boom in the 1990s. He led Wipro for 53 years before giving up chairmanship in 2019. Now 79 years old, will Premji pave India’s path to AI glory too?

A Billion-Dollar Bet

Wipro has decided to invest $1bn in advancing AI capabilities over the next three years. It has also launched Wipro ai360, a comprehensive AI-first innovation ecosystem that is supposed to build on Wipro’s investment. Wipro Infrastructure Engineering, the company’s industrial engineering arm, is said to be betting on AI and is planning to accelerate its automation business.

These are in addition to Premji Invests’ bets on Hippocratic AI, a healthcare LLM, Hugging Face, a New York-based company that builds computational tools for building applications using machine learning, Australian graphic design platform Canva, AI software engineering model Poolside and user interface generation platform Galileo AI.

“The next decade, we believe, will be the age of AI,” said Rishad Premji, Azim Premji’s son and Wipro’s executive chairman in his letter to shareholders that was part of the latest annual report. TK Kurien, managing partner and chief investment officer at Premji Invest, once said at a media interaction that the company is among the largest Indian asset managers to use AI tools in public equity and that the company was working on an AI quant model for public markets too.

Premji Invest has poured in $1.04bn in AI projects just this year, nearly double of the $540mn it invested last year, according to data compiled by Tracxn. Meanwhile, Wipro managing director and chief executive Srini Pallia said at an analysts’ call after the first quarter of 2025 that one of the major aims of the company is “to develop AI-powered industry and cross industry solutions using a consulting-led approach.”

In the AI Future

Premji Invest started its AI journey three years ago, according to TK Kurien. He has been quoted saying that AI is helping asset managers parse over 10,000 companies on 600 parameters to identify investment opportunities. Kurien has also pointed out in the past that Premji Invest is exploring how AI can be used to streamline legal processes.

“This will help India’s overburdened courts resolve cases faster and aid the government’s efforts to offer services more effectively,” he has been quoted saying. There are also reports that Premji Invest is considering enhanced investment in AI implementation in technology and financial services, along with consumer services and healthcare in the private market.

Meanwhile, Wipro is investing in AI training for its workforce and attempting to leverage AI in day-to-day business activities. “We have already provided foundational training to over 225,000 employees. An additional 30,000 employees have received advanced AI training,” according to Wipro chief executive Pallia.

Interestingly, the Premji family looks at the investments in AI as philanthropy. Azim Premji set up a family office in 2006 as a perpetual investment vehicle to fund philanthropic initiatives. This fund has been used to drive humanitarian causes both within India and outside. The family believes AI implementation will improve human life overall.

In 2011, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, wrote of Azim Premji in the American magazine Time, “If anyone personifies India’s economic transformation, it is Azim Premji.”

Gates went on to write: “A pioneer of India’s IT-outsourcing industry, Premji helped unleash a generation of skilled technical professionals who make up India’s growing middle class…But it may be his pioneering leadership in India’s nascent field of philanthropy that will be Premji’s lasting legacy.”

Thirteen years later, Azim Premji and his family have married the cause of philanthropy to technological evolution. And Premji seems to be on the cusp of leading even the next phase of India’s technological journey.