What They Said: Preeti Lobana of Google India on AI
Let’s take a look at what Preeti Lobana, Google India’s Country Manager and Vice President, said about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Lobana, who previously served as vice president overseeing Google’s publisher, partner, ads content teams, and gTech, was appointed as the new country manager and vice president of Google India operations in December 2024. Across multiple instances and interviews, Lobana shared Google’s plans for its AI push and investments in India. Let’s now take a look at them.

Also Read: What They Said: Vijay Shekhar Sharma of One 97 Communications, Paytm on AI

What They Said: Timeline

June 2025

Google sees India as a critical market, Lobana said in an interview with PTI, adding that with the country on track to reach a USD 1-trillion digital economy in the near future, the tech giant hopes to leverage its expertise in advertising, cloud technology, and advanced AI to contribute to the nation’s economic growth.

“So, if you look at the digital landscape in India, (it is) so unique… think about the adoption. Who would have imagined a few years ago that UPI and therefore, consequently, you know, payment systems like Google Pay would be so widely adopted,” she reportedly said.

“As you know, we are looking at a 1 trillion digital economy in the next few years… so how do we bring the best of Google ads, our cloud and cutting-edge AI to power India’s economic momentum,” she said, outlining Google’s priorities for this market.

Lobana further noted that India was the launchpad for YouTube Shorts and GPay, showcasing the key role the market plays in Google’s global strategy.

“So if you think about the short form video ‘shorts’ came on YouTube first to India… Look at the scale of Google Pay in India. So that is where we launched the product, taking the learnings overseas. So India is a very critical market for us, and we have made investments in putting a lot of large teams here,” she said, according to the report dated June 17, 2025.

November 2025

Global Leadership Summit 2025

Preeti Lobana said India’s artificial intelligence journey must be driven by inclusivity, innovation, and local empowerment — not imitation. She was speaking at the CNBC-TV18 Global Leadership Summit 2025 in Mumbai, according to the report dated November 7, 2025.

“The real opportunity for India and the Global South,” she said, “is not just to catch up but to leapfrog ahead because we’ve been given this unique technology to solve some of our biggest systemic issues at scale.”

AI for Inclusive Growth Across Healthcare, Education, and Agriculture

Lobana emphasised that AI can — and should — enable inclusive growth by bridging access gaps in education, healthcare, and agriculture. However, to achieve that, she said India needs to build its own models of development rooted in local languages, culture, and realities.

“AI for India needs to be inclusive rather than exclusive,” she noted. “We need to make sure that AI that is deployed understands the key languages in India… and for that, training AI through local datasets is absolutely key.”

Lobana highlighted Google’s ongoing work on open-source models like GEA and Project Vaani, which create datasets of Indian dialects to make AI more accurate and accessible.

“We are building compute and infrastructure locally, developing that pipeline of talent, because we mustn’t be just implementing what’s built elsewhere; we are innovating here,” she said.

“We’ve learned to make our products work for low-end phones and intermittent connectivity,” she reportedly said, citing lighter versions of Search, Maps, YouTube, and the simplicity of GPay, which “can be used by everyone from a street vendor to the most sophisticated user.”

She said Google is embedding “security by design” into its systems through measures such as watermarking synthetic content, real-time threat intelligence sharing, and user education to build resilience against scams.

Through its startup accelerator, Google continues to back AI-led innovation in India, but Lobana stressed that the focus must remain on solving the country’s toughest problems — from preventive healthcare and rural diagnostics to personalised learning and efficient logistics.

“If it works on a Rs 6,000 phone and in local languages,” she reportedly said, “it will scale not just in India but anywhere in the world.”

AI is about Transforming Lives

“As competition for data centres and users of AI products heats up in India, Google will focus on staying ‘AI-first’ and invest in government initiatives and local AI startups, Lobana said in an interview.

“AI gives us a tool to leapfrog ahead,” she said, according to a Live Mint report dated November 12, 2025. “This is about transforming lives, not just balance sheets.”

Google’s Safe and Trusted AI Event

Responsible and trusted use of artificial intelligence (AI) will be critical to India’s technology-led transformation, with the onus on every stakeholder in the ecosystem to ensure safety and accountability, Preeti Lobana said on November 20, 2025, according to multiple media reports, including The Economic Times and PTI.

“For AI to be really adopted and be in everyday use, there is a lot of onus on all of us as an ecosystem to make sure that it is safe and trusted. AI would serve as a crucial foundation in the journey towards a Viksit Bharat, underlining that trust and safety are prerequisites for widespread adoption,” she said at Google’s ‘Safe and Trusted AI” event.

Citing the country’s diversity, Lobana said, “The complexity of India will show the world how technology can scale and drive impact, even to solve the toughest systemic issues… With precise, tailored, locally contextualised solutions for the many pockets (that exist in India).”

“AI represents a transformational technology that will unlock human potential, with India leading this revolution in real time,” she added.

She also emphasised that while AI promises a major leap forward, progress must be built on a foundation of confidence and collaboration. “It can’t be just a leap of faith. We must take a confident step into solid ground,” she said, adding that safety is not a finish line but a continuous, collective responsibility.

Also Read: What They Said: Sid Swaminathan of Jio BlackRock on AI

December 2025

In an interview with Moneycontrol’s Managing Editor Nalin Mehta, Lobana stressed why India remains a critical growth area with vital strategic importance to Google despite tensions around trade and tariffs.

“In all of these aspects, India is looked at as a major growth area. The vision of Viksit Bharat, the honourable Prime Minister’s vision, and the India AI Mission are all very powerful statements on where we want to go. For Sundar Pichai and Google and for us, we are here with India as we look to grow our digital economy – partnering with consumers, businesses and enterprises,” she said, according to the report dated December 4, 2025.

Google’s Investments: Data Centres, Talent, and Infrastructure

“Stuff will happen around. We are deeply committed. You know we made a recent announcement about investing $15 billion in our gigawatt scale data center in Visakapatnam. It’s undersea cables, it’s renewable energy. We announced the opening of our largest ever office in India in Ananta in Bengaluru. That’s a very large office. We recently launched the first-ever in Asia Google Safety Engineering Center in India – with a focus on privacy and safety. It is the first ever in Asia. So, we are continuing to invest. Some things happen around the ecosystem but we continue to be on our path to be with India and proceed and grow,” she said, responding to a question about investments despite tensions around tariffs.

She explained her top priorities for the coming year, noting that the first is how best AI can be leveraged.

“We deeply believe our AI is very powerful. Gemini is like the best-in-class model. How do we embed AI in products and services to make sure AI is the lever that helps India leapfrog ahead for the systemic challenges? The next step is about how do we make AI models locally relevant from the Indic languages point of view or other local contexts. For example, you know how Indian women after delivery post-natal care eat gond ke laddoo? Now any model built overseas won’t have that context when you talk about post-natal maternal care. So, we build all that into our model so that it becomes locally aware in terms of Indic languages but also culturally aware. How do we do this for open-source models like Gemma is a priority so India’s vastness and complexity become an advantage and we can show to the world that this is a model that can scale to the Global South and other countries.”

When asked how much of Google’s core technology is now being developed in India for the world, she reportedly said: “We started with foundational models like Gemini built outside India, but now we’re working hard to bring the local Indian context into them. We enrich these models with local languages — you need to bring 10-12, even 22 languages to these models — and with cultural nuances. We focus very hard on making sure that the models are truly multimodal, because in India people use voice, images, video or circle-to-search as easily as text. When we open-source them through efforts like Gemma or MedGemma, the question is how do you provide the right datasets. Google is constantly working in collaboration with institutions like the Indian Institute of Science and Project Vaani so the right datasets are available for the wider ecosystem so they can train their models on Indian data.”

On India’s AI mission, she reportedly said, “It is amazing to see that the government has a clear vision and it has clear pillars — whether we are talking about compute, democratising access to AI or privacy and security.”

“We are bringing more compute, local compute, adding TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) so industries in India can train their models, along with the infrastructure investments and skilling. AI has to be inclusive for all,” she added.

Speaking about the recent USD 15 billion investment, “Frankly, this USD 15 billion investment in Vizag is the largest ever in a data centre outside of the US. That tells you the strategic importance and criticality of India and the Vizag data centre. It is a one-gigawatt data center but it is also about the commitments we are making for clean green energy: adding power to the grid, harnessing solar, wind and other sources of power.

It’s also about deploying additional undersea cables and capacity. We are talking about faster speeds, less latency and more localisation. That is a very big statement on our part to say we believe in India. It is a strategic location and we are making that data centre expansion now. It is a fairly ambitious investment. When we talk about giga-watt scale, it is very big. It is the single largest investment of its kind outside the US. No other country has such an investment.”

Also Read: What They Said: Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas of IMF on AI

Speaking about the transition from Search to AI, she reportedly said, “I am sure you heard our earnings call two-three weeks ago – that was our first quarter with USD 100 billion revenue. Of course, Cloud is growing very rapidly but a lot of that revenue is grounded in what we get from the Ads business on the back of Search. Those results speak for the fact that search is doing well, even with AI.

What we are seeing is people have longer queries. We have 5 trillion searches. We aren’t seeing a reduction in search queries. There has been innovation in Search: when you think about people searching using Google Lens, which is very large in India or Voice, which is very large in India or Circle-to-search, where you can just circle something and search it. We are not seeing Search slow down at all. Our results reflect that Search is continuing to be robust. There’s just a change in how consumers are using it and how we are meeting the moment.”

In fact, what we are seeing is that now when people click on a link, they get better qualified leads. Because in AI mode, we also link the sources. Those are better qualified links. People don’t bounce back. They spend more time on the website. So search is robust and healthy and we are meeting the moment by evolving search.”

Speaking about changes or divergences in terms of Indian languages, she said: “India is not one India, and you can’t pick and choose. After English, Hindi has the largest scale, but when we expanded AI mode into multiple languages, we looked at Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and others.

For me, the biggest thing is that we are not going sequentially, saying this language first or that one. The question is: how quickly can we bring the best of AI to many languages at scale? Every Indian says, my language is important to me. So we start with one and then rapidly use the technology to expand to others. We may pilot in one, but then we scale quickly to other languages.”

This is a developing story, and more quotes and insights from Preeti Lobana will be added as they become available.

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