Google’s strategy in India will continue to be closely aligned with the country’s aspirations of becoming a developed nation in the next two decades, Roma Datta Chobey, Google’s managing director and interim country manager for India, told ET’s Surabhi Agarwal and Annapurna Roy in an interview. Chobey, a former banker who has been with Google for nine years, was elevated to the role after her predecessor Sanjay Gupta was named president, Asia-Pacific for Google. Chobey also spoke about how the decision to host Google’s genAI model locally will aid businesses, the company’s investment strategy in India and regulations on AI.

Edited excerpts:

What are going to be your focus areas as chief of Google India?

India’s vastness, complexity, and diversity is a huge opportunity, but it can also be a challenge. Solving for the larger ecosystem is a very, very important part of it. There’s a lot of work that has already happened, so it is about continuing it and taking it forward and making technology accessible through the length and the breadth of the country. I will continue to take that legacy forward, to take everybody along. The focus is how do we make technology accessible, comprehensible, and even affordable.

What was the trigger for the decision to host Google’s Gemini model in India?

Data residency has been a huge conversation recently, for the right reasons, especially when it comes to sectors where data residency in India is paramount, whether it’s healthcare, financial services or others. For those, you’re going to have the Gemini model based in India – the data and the model will be running in India.

It gives people more assurance to know that the data is here. It also shows that India is a very important market for us, and we are solving (issues) in a focused way for India.

What are your views on how India should regulate AI?

AI is too important not to be regulated, and not to be regulated well. It’s a very general-purpose technology that can be used for a vast range of use cases, and how we build these regulations, principle-based, how you incorporate the nuances, will be very important.

The good part is there are many conversations happening across the board, with many different stakeholders – government, policymakers, tech companies, researchers, academia. It is still a nascent technology, and it is very important to figure out what are the upsides, as well as what are the downsides of this. We are investing heavily in understanding that. At Google, we have our AI principles, we have our practices in place, we have a governance framework. We also do red team activities to figure out how things can go wrong.

For any one person to figure out all of this is tough, but it’s very, very important for us to come together and have the dialogue. Having said that, we first want to see what is good – you want to protect the benefit. You also want the innovation to thrive. It must take care of the nuance.

What’s your plan to resolve the stand-off with startups on Google Play billing?

For context, Google Play is playing an important role in making us an app-first nation. Indian developers are making Rs 4,000 crore through Google Play. What’s more interesting is that 84% of this is coming from exports.

We work very closely with startups and developers across genres. For us to ensure the quality, we do a lot of UX/UI, we include tools for developers. For all this, we must make it a viable business for us to have that kind of technology, to invest in the Play Store, for people to be able to work for India and a global audience. The business model must be viable and that is why the Play billing conversation.

We are very closely interacting both with the developers as well as with the government. We are also helping developers comply with our policies. I’m hopeful we will find a solution that works for everyone.

What is the update on the $1O billion India digitisation fund announced by Google?

From an investment perspective, the idea has been to boost digitisation of India. The next decade will also be a lot more about AI and how we are partnering in AI. That will take centre-stage. Agriculture and health have always been there. There’s also some amount of growing focus on the deep tech side of things because that will become more important with AI coming in, including how you can translate that into robotics for various purposes, across healthcare, space tech and so on.

Can you talk about Google’s overall AI strategy for India?

We at Google believe that AI is a force for good. It’s still at a very nascent stage. When we are building for AI, Google India ‘s vision will be, first and foremost, that it is doing good for society. The second is how are you controlling the biases? Given the diversity of the country, there cannot be room for biases. The third is safety, because today AI is part of everyday life, it impacts all of us in our personal and professional lives. We look at leveraging AI to improve the lives of every Indian – that’s a very ambitious goal – not us alone, but partnering with the government, for public services, where AI can play a huge role in access. We want to solve for businesses of all sizes, that’s important for our economy. We are also focusing on critical sectors like health and agriculture and will look at other sectors where we want to build. We must do it responsibly, sustainably and inclusively.