As the cost of AI plummets, experts see a future where affordable intelligence becomes a routine service, with India positioned as a potential global leader in pervasive AI adoption and infrastructure-driven innovation.
The next phase of artificial intelligence is likely to be defined less by headline-grabbing model advances than by a steep fall in the price of using intelligence, according to a commentary from Fireflies co-founder and chief executive Krish Ramineni published by the Economic Times. His argument is simple: when technology gets cheaper, adoption broadens rapidly, and AI will follow the same path as computers, storage and internet bandwidth before it. The question, then, is not only which company builds the smartest model, but which one makes AI cheap, dependable and easy enough to disappear into everyday work.
That view fits a wider pattern in the global AI market. Stanford’s 2025 AI Index found that the cost of GPT-3.5-level performance fell from $20 per million tokens in late 2022 to $0.07 by late 2024, a decline of more than 280-fold in less than two years. As that cost curve bends down, the practical uses of AI widen: email summaries appear before the workday starts, meeting preparation happens automatically and draft replies are generated before users even open their laptops. In that model, most people may not care which system produced the output so long as it is fast, reliable and affordable.
Ramineni also argued that the world is still early in AI adoption despite the intensity of debate in tech hubs. Even with ChatGPT reportedly passing 1 billion monthly users in June 2026, billions of people still lack reliable internet access and many have never had a meaningful experience with AI. That gap helps explain why India is increasingly viewed as one of the most important growth markets for the technology. The Atlantic Council says India has adopted a use-case-driven strategy centred on education, healthcare, energy, agriculture and financial services, while also aiming to bring informal workers into the digital economy. Drishti IAS reported that the country’s AI workforce is already large and expanding, with more than 6 million people employed in tech and AI roles and a projected increase of more than 1.25 million by 2027.
India’s appeal is not only its scale but also the way it has previously turned digital infrastructure into mass-market utility. The country’s Unified Payments Interface made digital payments routine, cheap mobile data brought millions online and Aadhaar turned digital identity into a public utility. The same logic is now being applied to AI. Policy reporting on the IndiaAI Mission says the government is subsidising compute, building datasets and funding domestic model development, while keeping regulation comparatively light-touch and relying on existing legal frameworks for governance. That combination of ambition, infrastructure and low-cost access is why India is being seen as a test case for whether AI can become a basic service rather than a luxury product.
For Fireflies and other companies in the sector, that means the real prize may not be a moment of model supremacy but a sustained reduction in the cost of intelligence itself. If that happens, AI could become as routine as search or messaging: always available, largely invisible and woven into daily life across languages, income levels and professions. In that scenario, the winners will be those that help make intelligence available to everyone, not just those that briefly top a benchmark.
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