India can democratise expertise with AI power: Google DeepMind sr exec

India's biggest AI ‘opportunity unlock' is in democratising expertise at scale and advancing scientific frontiers, Pushmeet Kohli, Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind said, citing its transformative potential for 1.4 billion people, from expanding healthcare access to accelerating drug discovery.

Kohli told media that India has exceptional talent and a strong education system that has produced outstanding researchers and engineers, many of whom are contributing to core AI development.

He noted that Google DeepMind's Bengaluru lab has made fundamental contributions to foundational models and their applications of AI across critical sectors. Indian talent, he said, will play a vital role not only in advancing core machine learning and AI technologies but also in applying them to areas such as agriculture, healthcare and social systems.

Describing the current moment in AI as "amazing", he said the focus has now shifted firmly to impact.

Kohli, a distinguished scientist and senior executive at Google DeepMind - the advanced AI research arm of Google - said that beyond widening access, AI's role is in unlocking new treatments for diseases and accelerating drug discovery.

The broader opportunity, he said, is to harness AI to tackle longstanding challenges while driving scientific breakthroughs.

Kohli said AI can serve as a powerful "democratising force", helping expand access to high-quality and reliable healthcare, a persistent challenge for many countries worldwide.

Google DeepMind - Since its founding in 2010 - has focused on using AI to accelerate scientific discovery, driving breakthroughs across biology, materials science, physics, climate science and mathematics.

Core to its strategy is solving fundamental ‘root node' problems that unlock entire fields, exemplified by its protein-folding work, that earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

"AI is ability for us to democratise expertise, to tackle problems that we have not been able to solve till now...democratising expertise, say, for high quality, reliable health care. This is a challenge that many countries are facing around the world, including India. How do we make sure that 1.4 billion Indians have access to high-quality healthcare?

This is where AI comes in," he said. By delivering breakthroughs in medical sciences, strengthening agricultural support, and extending critical information to underserved communities, AI can help uplift society in meaningful ways, he said.

AI can be a powerful force for unlocking knowledge and information about healthcare, and beyond that for agriculture, energy, and other areas, Kohli added.

Highlighting AI's role in science, Kohli pointed to breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, which solved the long-standing challenge of protein structure prediction and opened new frontiers in biology. He said the tool has been widely democratised, with millions of researchers globally, including around 180,000 in India, using it to drive discoveries in medicine and crop science.

The broader goal is to replicate such an impact across fields like material science, fusion energy and quantum computing.

Google DeepMind's AlphaFold is an AI system that accurately predicts protein structures, solving a decades-old scientific challenge and accelerating breakthroughs in biology, drug discovery and life sciences research worldwide.

Kohli said AlphaFold has so far had a significant impact among AI-for-science applications and advancements, citing its use by 3.3 million researchers as evidence of both scale and real-world relevance.