Ten Indians and people of Indian origin feature on TIME's 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. They span founders, researchers, CEOs and policymakers working across foundational AI, enterprise technology, semiconductors, healthcare and AI governance. TIME published the fourth edition of TIME100 AI on August 27, naming 100 people across four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Among them are Sarvam AI co-founder Vivek Raghavan, Adalat AI co-founder Utkarsh Saxena, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra and Caltech professor Anima Anandkumar. Together, the names offer a snapshot of the growing Indian imprint on the global AI ecosystem, from foundational models and enterprise technology to healthcare, semiconductors and AI governance. Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, is listed under Innovators. Raghavan spent over a decade working on Aadhaar before moving to AI, and co-founded Sarvam in August 2023 with Pratyush Kumar after both worked on open-source Indian-language AI at AI4Bharat, the research lab at IIT Madras. TIME's profile focuses on his case for AI sovereignty. Raghavan has argued that Indians are exporting data and importing intelligence, a trade he compares to the country exporting cotton and importing cloth a century ago. Sarvam released its 30B and 105B open-weight models in March, and introduced Sarvam Vision, a vision language model covering 22 Indian languages, in February. In August, Nvidia joined an extension that completed Sarvam’s $300 million Series B, which valued the company at about $1.5 billion. Utkarsh Saxena, Co-founder and CEO of Adalat AI, is also listed under Innovators. Adalat AI builds speech and language tools for Indian courtrooms, working on the transcription and case-management bottlenecks that slow the judicial system. Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM, appears under Leaders and is one of 17 listmakers on TIME's worldwide cover. Born in Andhra Pradesh and an IIT Kanpur graduate, Krishna has led IBM since 2020. Arvind Ramanis listed under Leaders as acting head of the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, placing him at the centre of American AI standards-setting. Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, is under Innovators. An IIT Madras alumna with a PhD from Cornell, she previously served as senior director of machine learning research at Nvidia. Suchi Saria, Founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, is under Innovators for her work applying machine learning to clinical decision-making and patient deterioration prediction. Sanjay Mehrotra, Chairman, President and CEO of Micron Technology, is under Innovators. Micron's high-bandwidth memory has become one of the constrained inputs in the AI hardware supply chain. Sunny Gandhi, Co-executive Director of Encode, is under Shapers. Encode is a youth-led
