From lab to impact: Advancing AI for real-world progress in India

Whether it is solving foundational genomic questions to protect food systems, giving teachers more time to mentor students, or helping local businesses scale, AI is most impactful when it is built in partnership with the people who need it most.

With its deep technical talent, diversity, and thriving digital public infrastructure, India has become the epicenter of applied innovation - showing the world how frontier research can be deployed to deliver population-scale progress and transform everyday lives. Today, we are announcing new initiatives across crop science, education, agriculture, and economic inclusion designed to scale real-world impact from the ground up.

Strengthening global food security

Climate change is straining global food systems. Climate-resilient nutrient-rich crops like sorghum, also known as jowar, are critical for helping farmers to adapt and build resilience, especially in vulnerable dryland areas.

To accelerate the development of such globally essential multi-purpose crops, Google DeepMind, and Google.org via the AI Collaborative for Food Security, are collaborating with the Hyderabad-headquartered International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and the Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle.

This collaboration will build an open-access global public good, a genetic atlas that will include indigenous collections of sorghum varieties to support a range of use cases – from nutritious cereal, to animal fodder, biofuel and more. Drawing on a representative sample from ICRISAT’s genebank of over 44,000 distinct seeds from over 90 countries, including India, this initiative pairs advanced genetic analysis with machine learning to identify the most promising plant combinations. The resulting AI-supported genetic catalog is aimed at helping breeders and researchers across the world to develop more resilient and productive sorghum varieties faster than traditional methods, which can involve decade-long trial-and-error processes.

Google DeepMind will also support a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at ICRISAT - its first fellowship in India and first outside the UK - to help build tools that can similarly characterize genomes for other critical crops like pulses, including chickpea, groundnut, and pigeon peas (arhar, tuar dal).

This work aligns with India’s national focus on millets as a pillar of agricultural resilience, turning local research into a blueprint for global food security.

Supporting global agri resilience

At Google, we have been working on climate-resilient agriculture for several years. Our AnthroKrishi team’s India-first Agricultural Understanding models, which now also provide insights for 11 countries, have been enabling policy makers and innovators to better support farmers.

Amnex has integrated our agri model APIs into the Government of Gujarat’s Krushi Pragati crop intelligence platform, supporting over 900 million SMS-based advisories for over 600,000 farmers across the state within just the last year. Such advisories, spanning crop and soil health, pest and disease management, and weather pattern observations, have been assisting field productivity and farmer livelihood across over 14 million hectares of land.

OpenAgriNet (OAN), a global coalition seeded and led by EkStep Foundation, has incorporated our APIs for an analytics dashboard to support agricultural administrators. OAN is now exploring the Agricultural Understanding model outputs for a comprehensive agricultural application that supports the entire agri ecosystem – from innovators developing specialized services, to cooperatives building detailed understanding of farms. OAN is especially focused on consolidating information helpful for farmers, which is often hosted in different locations, on a single platform and in a language of their choice.

We are now expanding access to our Agricultural Understanding models, making them available in public preview. This streamlined API access empowers developers, startups, and researchers to accelerate localized solutions for a wider variety of use cases and hyperlocal farming challenges, further strengthening agricultural resilience and supporting smallholder farmers at scale.

Empowering educators and building AI fluency

To help Teachers reclaim time for what matters most - mentoring and inspiring students - we launched the Google AI Educator Series in India this May in partnership with five state and regional partners. The mobile-first training program helps educators build practical confidence with tools like Gemini and Gemini Notebook to design lesson plans, create tailored learning aids, and streamline daily preparation.

We have already trained over 80,000 educators across the country since May. Following encouraging feedback from educators, we are now expanding the Google AI Educator Series through new partnerships with Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim, and the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

To support educators nationwide, we are also launching the program as a free, online self-paced training. Designed to fit into demanding schedules, this NEP 2020-aligned curriculum consists of flexible modules. This online training is currently available in English, with Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Assamese, Odia, and Punjabi versions arriving later this month.

We are also supporting educators across 100 Atal Tinkering Labs through ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered desktop application for STEM curricula, and partnering with institutions like IIT Bombay and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to anchor educational AI research in real-world academic settings.

AI for economic inclusion: Backing India's small businesses

India’s more than 90 million micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) form the backbone of the nation’s economic resilience. They employ over 345 million people yet many face compounding challenges.

As part of our commitment to supporting India's national AI roadmap, Google.org is providing $15 million in funding to The/Nudge to accelerate the growth of the country’s MSMEs. This initiative will fund the development of scalable AI tools to expand small enterprises' access to formal credit, market discovery, and compliance. The program will feature an open call for proposals to source innovative solutions, alongside a multilingual, voice-led platform to train local talent in Tier 3 and 4 towns with job-ready skills and connect them directly with small businesses.

Looking ahead

The momentum we are seeing in translating science into real societal impact is just the beginning. By deepening our partnerships with scientists, educators, government leaders, and grassroots organizations, we are accelerating our efforts to ensure that advanced AI is shaped by, and benefits, the communities building India's future.