China far ahead of India on using AI for defence technology, says LatentAI CEO

Hindustan Times

17 hours ago

Washington: Jags Kandasamy, the founder of US-based defence tech company LatentAI, sat down with HT for an interview on India's defence tech ecosystem and the use of AI in modern warfare. Kandasamy — who is partnering with Indian firms to win Indian defence contracts — highlights the bureaucratic and procedural challenges that make it difficult for global tech firms to work with India. He pointed to China's progress on deploying AI for defence purposes and argues that India needs to leapfrog ahead in defence technologies. Jags Kandasamy, the founder of US-based defence tech company LatentAI (Supplied photo)
Q. What sort of projects do you intend to work on for the Indian military?
So let me give you an example. At this year's Aero India, I met with a colonel in the Indian Army and he was demonstrating an indigenous capability that the Army had created, which was using computer vision on an automated weapon system to be deployed on India's borders. So you define a zone of activity and if there is human movement over there, the machine shoots them down. So in that case, they were using heavy computing and you cannot scale that weapon system the way that they had designed because of hardware limitations. That is a critical use case that our company can solve. We worked with the US Navy on a battery operated underwater vehicle with very limited space and so there were limitations on how much computing power it had. Our job was to compress and optimise an AI model to fit that limited hardware to allow the vehicle to run efficiently. We did that successfully. So that is what we bring to the table. The idea is that autonomous warfare is going to be the future. Ukraine has shown, for example, that drone warfare is here to stay. AI will be used for target recognition, surveillance, intelligence gathering and the like and there will be a lot of demands on military hardware to run AI models efficiently. We're solving that problem.
Q. You're an American defence firm that has partnered up with InferQ, which is an Indian firm. We've seen a new defence tech ecosystem come up between America and India. The governments have pushed for it through new initiatives like INDUSX and IDEX. How well has it worked?
Absolutely, so I was in Coimbatore last summer, and I met with Forge ventures, which is an Indian defence-focused venture firm and Vish — who heads Forge — was part of an INDUSX cohort that came over to America. So Vish is clearly plugged in with the Ministry of Defence as well as America's Defence Department over here. Vish was one who made introductions to several companies in India and our partner InferQ was one of them. That is the clear, direct path that helped me forge this relationship,
Q. How is it working with the Indian defence bureaucracy as a foreign firm?
Look, there are a lot of challenges that still need to be overcome. One simple thing is that we don't have a clear mechanism of obtaining clearances for a non-Indian passport holders to work with the Indian Ministry of Defence. Also the bureaucracy in India can be difficult. It takes 18-24 months to even move things forward, right? It is an absolute pain to work with bureaucracy. There are no questions about that. Transparency doesn't exist. So when we're in the US, when we submit a proposal, we know all the different steps that we have to go through and all the decision makers along the way. All of that is very transparent in the US ecosystem. In India, I don't get to see that as a foreign company. And even Indian companies don't get to see that.
I am advising a couple of founders in the Indian defence ecosystem. And one guy, he almost had to shut down his company because he built a prototype that the army wanted to see built. He showed it to them. It took them two years, literally two years, to get it certified. And that is the certification. It does not mean he won a contract and then he has to wait again before he gets a contract. I actually think India can become a great proving ground for defence technology. India has the geographical distribution that no other country can have from swamps to deserts to the high range mountains and everything in between. You have a wonderful variety of landscape that one can test technology out. How can US companies leverage that? How does India make it much easier for US companies to come and do business that way?
Q. How do you see the China challenge from the Indian perspective? Can you compare the levels of progress from the two sides on defence AI?
My personal opinion is that, when it comes to AI applications of defence, the Chinese are like a third year PhD student while India is still in elementary school. India's defence forces have the intent to get new technologies but I don't know if they have the mechanisms they need. I was talking to a few flag officers in India. Since India doesn't have a proper battle management system today, they were looking at hardcore maps, like paper maps, to look at what things are happening. I'll tell you a story. Back in 2009-2010, I was starting another company in Atlanta, and I was approached by the Chinese Communist Party to build a company in Shanghai. They offered to provide me with resources and support for three years, including picking up the payroll costs but I would need to build the company there. Now obviously I declined but you see the way China was approaching this issue even in the 2010s. I was a big, vocal critic of this, and nobody in the US government was paying attention to this. What India needs today is a quantum leap on defence technology. India has leapfrogged in the past like with the telecom sector and it needs to do that again.
Q. So what exactly is working in the Indian defence tech ecosystem?
I think the IDEX platform launched by the Minister of Defence is uncovering a lot of new technologies that are being homegrown. IDEX is able to expose a lot of talent and technologies and that is important since there is a lot of talent in India and there are a lot of smart people there from a technology point of view.
Q. How could India and America work more effectively together on this front?
India and the US are the linchpins of democratic society for the next century and there is a threat to that. So just using that as a foundation, there are things India and America can do to work more closely here. For example, can there be reciprocity around clearances? If somebody is cleared over here in America, can they be given priority such that India does its own due diligence and provide a level of clearance that gives them access, or gives them permission to work on defence technology.
That would be my first recommendation. Secondly, I was born in India but I'm now an American citizen. Now, there is always this gripe from the American side about India having a lot of Russian hardware. So how does interoperability work? Because India is not going to get rid of Russian hardware. So if we are providing our technology, how does it co-exist within the Indian ecosystem, next to a Russian system? That needs to be solved. I don't think there is a clear, easy solution. But can we define interfaces that are transparent, that protect sensitive secrets for both sides? That would be something to work on.