InMobi bets on proprietary AI models to power next phase of tech dominance: Naveen Tewari

New Delhi: InMobi claims its mobile advertising services have a reach of 2 billion users across more than 150 countries and has developed its own agentic commerce system that operates across more than 100 million devices globally, including mobile lock screens and smart TVs.

Against that backdrop, InMobi CEO and founder Naveen Tewari said the balance of power in technology is shifting away from software towards AI models trained on proprietary data.

"The future of technology companies is that the power is not as much in software anymore as it used to be. The power is moving into the proprietary models that you are basically training using proprietary data. So, even all the frontier models are all commoditised. The value is in the models which have proprietary data," Tewari said.

He said India will need to build proprietary vertical models for its own region on top of frontier models. ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude 3 are among the leading frontier models that companies are using to deliver AI-based services.

The comments come as the Indian government backs open-source models for the development of sovereign AI capabilities, and as debate grows around how India’s IT and internet firms position themselves in the AI era.

At the summit, Indian start-up Sarvam unveiled a frontier model, positioning itself as a competitor to global frontier players.

Tewari said the earlier advantage of internet technologies coming from the West has diminished.

"Now, it's a level playing field. We can actually test products on a much larger number of consumers and then make them go global. That's our big advantage. We can build products from here (India) and take them into enterprises globally. That advantage never existed before, and I think we have been able to essentially make that happen," he said.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Tewari also said AI could unlock more than USD 3 trillion in incremental economic impact for India by 2047 by reshaping how commerce functions.

"We are essentially trying to create commerce models that are trained on proprietary consumer data, which basically then trains those models and becomes different. The world is moving very rapidly. What you saw in the last two or three years is not even valid anymore," Tewari said.