Post by Karya

India just became the world’s largest and most active market for AI model adoption, outpacing every other nation in users of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI tools, driven by scale, affordable data, a young digital population and rapid everyday use across sectors. But if adoption alone becomes the yardstick of progress, we risk overlooking who AI actually works for — and who it doesn’t. In an era where millions interact with AI daily in India, the real frontier isn’t just usage, it’s trust, relevance, cultural grounding, real-world performance and inclusion. This is exactly where Samiksha matters most. Samiksha starts with a community-centered evaluation pipeline of 5 frontier AI models, co-created by The Collective Intelligence Project, Microsoft Research India and Karya, designed to ask the questions that matter on the ground, not just in labs or benchmarks. This is beyond testing models against artificial tasks.  It's about evaluating AI the way real people do; people who want answers to questions that mirror their reality. “I'm a woman entrepreneur starting a small textile business, can I get a loan under PMMY with minimal collateral? and which documents are required to apply for a PMMY loan?” Samiksha embeds community voices — including civil-society partners, practitioners and domain experts — at every stage of evaluation: • prompts • scoring criteria • language contexts • real user needs At the recent Samiksha event, we brought together researchers, practitioners and community partners to demonstrate that evaluation with communities leads to far richer, grounded insights than evaluation on behalf of them. With India’s explosive growth in AI adoption, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to shape how AI gets built right. Samiksha is a step in that direction: benchmarks designed with people — not just for models. For everyone building, using or stewarding AI, this work matters now more than ever. Drop in to Samiksha here : https://lnkd.in/gNcsmAET Samiksha is an official pre-summit event of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 Microsoft I The Collective Intelligence Project I BHASHINI - (Digital India BHASHINI Division) I IndiaAI I EkStep Foundation I Gooey.AI I Aapti Institute I ARMMAN I The Agency Fund I Soket AI Labs I Adalat AI I ARTPARK I Amitabh Nag I Kavita Bhatia