Google just made waves at the Google I/O Connect India 2025 event in Bengaluru, rolling out a series of game-changing initiatives to strengthen India’s AI ecosystem. The spotlight was on localising onshore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash, which promises faster and low-latency AI performance for Indian developers. This move is especially significant for regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, and governance, where speed and compliance matter.
Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind, highlighted the impact of Indian developers. He said they are crafting India’s success story by leveraging AI to build real-world applications that serve millions of businesses and users worldwide. The numbers back this up. Google revealed that the Play and Android platforms generated a staggering ₹4 lakh crore in revenue and created 35 lakh jobs in 2024 alone.
Developers got more good news with the introduction of agentic AI tools and optimised templates in Firebase Studio. These additions will help them build and deploy full-stack AI applications more efficiently. Mobile commerce also got a big push. Google announced expanded access to over 250 million mapped places worldwide and introduced India-specific pricing for Google Maps UI components. AI-powered summaries in the Places API will further enhance location-based services tailored for Indian users.
Supporting homegrown AI innovation, Google is collaborating with three India AI Mission startups: Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani. These partnerships focus on Make-in-India AI models built on Gemma. Sarvam’s recent “Sarvam-Translate” model is a prime example of this push for localised AI solutions. In another exciting development, Google is working with IIT Bombay’s BharatGen to improve ASR and TTS models for Indic languages.
The gaming community wasn’t left out. Google launched the ‘Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training’ program, a joint effort with Unity and GDAI. The program aims to train 500 Indian developers initially, offering over 30 hours of specialised coaching across various game development roles.
Adding a competitive edge, the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon encouraged developers to solve real-world challenges using AI. Startups like Sarvam, InVideo, Glance, and Nykaa showcased some brilliant solutions built with Google’s AI models, proving once again that India’s tech talent is second to none.