Who Will Bell The Consumer AI Cat?

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • As enterprise AI adoption moves forward, investors increasingly believe India’s biggest AI breakout could emerge from consumer products built around behaviour, habit formation and deeply personalised user experiences
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In India, almost every AI conversation today is about sovereign models, semiconductor fabs, GPU clusters, compute capacity, and the race to build the infrastructure powering the country’s AI ambitions. But after obsessing over these for a while now, investors are shifting their attention towards a far more unpredictable opportunity — consumer AI. And the question they are asking is: who will bell the cat? 

Their excitement is not irrational. Globally, consumer AI is rapidly moving beyond standalone chatbots and becoming deeply embedded inside mainstream internet products. From Canva and Notion integrating generative AI into everyday workflows to AI-native platforms like Character.AI, Perplexity, Cursor and Manus reshaping how users search, create, code and consume content online, a new generation of internet products has begun to emerge around AI-first behaviour.

Amid the current scheme of things, investors believe India, with its nearly 950 Mn internet users, mobile-first consumption habits and growing comfort with AI interactions, may finally be ready for its own consumer AI moment.

Building consumer AI is intricate, especially in a market as fragmented and behaviourally diverse as India. It is this problem statement that makes us ponder: can Indian founders build products that move beyond novelty and become part of users’ everyday digital behaviour? Let’s talk about this and more in this edition of The AI Shift.

Why Now?

As Indians become more comfortable interacting with AI, the next biggest AI opportunity is waiting to mushroom from creating consumer AI products. And at the centre of this opportunity will be consumer internet companies operating in consumer-facing sectors.