From automated farm tractors to exam paper grading, AI boosts efficiency for some in India

In a rural field in Karnal, northern India, farmer Bir Virk taps an iPad mounted next to his tractor’s steering wheel. The vehicle springs to life, autonomously harvesting potatoes with precision that would have amazed his ancestors. Nearly 145 kilometers away in New Delhi, educator Swetank Pandey uses algorithms to rapidly scan and grade thousands of handwritten exam papers for India’s competitive civil services exams.

Both innovators represent the quiet revolution of artificial intelligence sweeping across India, transforming traditional sectors with technology that enhances efficiency and productivity.

“I am able to farm very efficiently and I feel very happy that I do the work what my grandfather and father used to do. Now I am carrying the tradition forward with the right technology,” says Virk, whose AI-enabled tractor has slashed his work time by half.

As AI adoption surges globally, India is experiencing rapid integration of the technology across various sectors. The Indian government has launched national initiatives to fund AI research and workforce training, highlighted by this week’s five-day AI summit in New Delhi that has attracted heads of state and top technology executives.

With nearly a billion internet users, India has become a strategic battleground for global tech giants eager to scale their AI businesses in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets. Microsoft recently announced a $17.5 billion investment over four years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in India, following Google’s commitment of $15 billion over five years, which includes plans for the company’s first AI hub in the country.

“There’s some good use cases that have started. There are these scaling platforms that are now embedding AI into them,” notes Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice president at NASSCOM, a leading organization representing India’s technology industry.

Despite this progress, India faces significant challenges in AI development. The country has yet to develop its own large-scale AI model comparable to U.S.-based OpenAI or China’s DeepSeek. This gap highlights obstacles including limited access to advanced semiconductor chips, insufficient data center capacity, and the complexity of incorporating hundreds of local languages into AI systems.

The transition to AI has also created workforce disruption. Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest private employer, cut more than 12,000 jobs last year as it pivoted toward AI-powered operations. This underscores the dual nature of technological advancement – creating opportunities for some while displacing others.

For Virk, AI’s benefits are clear. After encountering AI-driven farming technology while working in the United States, he imported a system from a Swedish company upon returning to India in 2021. His automated tractor can plant seeds, spray fertilizer, and harvest crops with remarkable precision.

“Technology and intelligence play a big role in this. The tractor works in a straight line. It maintains an accuracy of 0.01 centimeter,” explains Virk. The system, costing approximately $3,864, combines a steering motor, satellite navigation, and AI-driven software that converts data into movement. It also logs errors and uploads them to a cloud platform, where the software company analyzes the information and sends updates back to the machine.

“Its most special feature is that it is self-learning,” adds Virk, highlighting the adaptive capabilities that distinguish modern AI systems.

In education, AI is transforming India’s famed coaching centers, where millions of young Indians compete for coveted civil service positions. Pandey’s coaching center employs large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, alongside other automation tools, to evaluate answer sheets, create targeted study materials, and structure syllabuses for aspirants.

This technology enables Pandey’s team to evaluate tens of thousands of answer sheets in as little as 20 to 25 minutes. “If you have a better machine, bigger system, you can do it in two minutes,” he says.

Currently, his coaching academy uses a hybrid approach where AI handles initial evaluations before teachers review the output, improving both efficiency and quality. Interestingly, Pandey has observed that AI often produces study materials that students find more relatable than those created by teachers.

“AI is able to give us in advance a basic idea what the student is doing right now and what next he or she should do to be able to achieve their goals,” Pandey explains.

As India continues its AI journey, the experiences of early adopters like Virk and Pandey illustrate both the transformative potential of the technology and the pragmatic, problem-solving approach that characterizes its implementation across the country’s diverse economic landscape.