Bhavish Aggarwal bats for India's global dominance in AI and other next-gen technologies

Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal is the latest billionaire to emerge out of India’s stock market boom after one of his companies, Ola Electric, went public last month.

When asked about how much money he has in the bank, Aggarwal candidly said, “I think... not enough to fund the dreams yet. Any amount of resources will be less.” His response drew thunderous applause from the audience at YourStory’s flagship tech summit Techsparks 2024 in Bengaluru.

Aggarwal’s rise has been meteoric, fuelled by his bold bets on sectors that many would deem impossible to crack. Whether it’s manufacturing battery cells in India or competing with global giants like OpenAI, Aggarwal has positioned himself as a leading voice in India’s burgeoning technology landscape.

Interestingly, Aggarwal’s public appearances have also undergone a transformation. No longer donning casual T-shirts or shirts, he now consistently wears a kurta, reflecting a sense of national pride.

“One of the things that has become a topic of discussion is 'why do I talk about India so much',” he said. “In the technology world, they are saying I am trying to pander favour with somebody, it is not like that. People are noticing me more now because I have a bigger platform now because my companies’ have grown so people are noticing.”

He claims that India is currently a digital colony of sorts, with most of the data that is being produced being used for profit by big tech companies from the US.

“We are the largest producer of digital data in the world. 20% of the worlds digital data is produced in India and none of it is stored in India, it is not owned by Indians, I don't own my resume on LinkedIn. LinkedIn owns your resume, Meta owns your selfie,” he emphasised.

“Our data created by us, by our hard work is exported outside of India, processed by their algorithm outside India and brought back to India and sold to us in dollars. This is the reality. Every cloud data used by startups is billed in dollars. The irony is that the data is ours,” he added.

Aggarwal currently runs three companies—EV company Ola Electric, consumer tech company Ola Consumer, and AI company Krutrim, all of which are working at various levels to build indigenous technologies. He admitted that his current successes are built on lessons learned from previous failures. He cited his attempts to enter the food delivery space as a prime example.

“I have had many failures along the way and thanks to the media attention all of you know,” he said. “But one I want to highlight here—which has deeply impacted my way of doing business—is my attempts at the food delivery space.”

Ola has made multiple attempts at food delivery in the past, including taking Swiggy and Zomato head on before the pandemic by acquiring foodpanda.

“Swiggy and Zomato are brilliant companies, run by brilliant entrepreneurs; they did a better job at that than us,” he said. “This was 2019 and 2020 just before Covid period. I went into a reflective and introspective mode and asked myself—why did I not succeed in doing that and how can I take learnings from that. My learning was that I was not playing to my strengths. I was just kind of doing a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) or a me-too kind of a business strategy.”

He said that after that, he has only worked on businesses that resonated with him, and that played to his and his companies’ strengths.

“My DNA and our DNA at Ola is technology and innovation, and not just doing things because others are doing it,” said Aggarwal. “After that you see all things we have done are based on that. Be it Ola Electric, Gigafactory, be it Ola Consumer...now we are becoming a leader in ONDC, which is an innovation and a new paradigm, and Krutrim is where we are investing into the chip itself."

He said that there are ten critical technologies that are relevant to the future of the world and India, and his mission is to make India number one in the world in at least two of them, which is new energy—through the manufacturing of battery cells via Ola Electric—and in AI through his all-encompassing artificial intelligence startup Krutrim.

However, Aggarwal hasn’t been immune to criticism. Krutrim’s generative AI chatbot has faced backlash for producing inaccurate results.

“We are building the AI models, we are building the cloud stack also as a competition to AWS or an Azure and we are building a chip which will power the cloud also,” he said. “It is a full stack thing, you can't do it all in one day, some people say your product is not as good as ChatGPT, how can you do it in one day? We will make sure the future happens, we are making progress everyday.”

Ola Electric has also been facing customer ire for not servicing their scooters, with many vehicles stuck in service centres for days. In response, Ola Electric announced on Friday that it is planning to double its service centres to 1,000 by December this year.

Aggarwal also said that the recent pivot from Ola Cabs to Ola Consumer is to capture the larger consumer internet opportunities that have emerged following the launch of the Indian government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

“You have to zoom out and see the entire world,” he said.

“India has been a new proponent of this open standards or DPI (digital public infrastructure) movement and with UPI (unified payment interface) it has been a success, ONDC is getting towards success, Ola Consumer is the biggest platform on ONDC, we are actually really adopting it and accelerating it. This whole DPI movement or open stack movement is very critical to the world of technology,” he added.

He said that only by adopting open source technologies, sectors like ecommerce can reach the common man.

“Benefit of open standard based tech will be that it will be more inclusive,” Aggarwal said. “It will take the Indian technology revolution to the rural part of India or to the average man. Today ecommerce is not part of the mass market of India, cabs are not used in the villages.”