India’s Digital Public Infrastructure has set a global benchmark for inclusive governance. As AI becomes central to the next phase of digital transformation, governments have an opportunity to deliver smarter, more personalised, and secure citizen services while strengthening cyber resilience. Himanshu Kumar Gupta, Senior Director – Government Business and Channels for India and SAARC at TrendAI, in an exclusive interview with Abhineet Kumar of Elets Technomedia, shares insights on AI-powered public infrastructure, sovereign AI, cybersecurity, and the future of resilient digital nations.
Edited excerpts:
Q1. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure ecosystem, including Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker and CoWIN, has become a global benchmark. How can AI accelerate the next phase of DPI evolution to deliver more proactive, personalised and citizen-centric public services?
India’s DPI has delivered unprecedented scale and accessibility. With millions of internet users as of, Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker have transformed how citizens access services. However, the next phase demands a shift from reactive service delivery to predictive citizenship.
AI can accelerate this evolution through three mechanisms.
- First, predictive service routing. AI identifying citizens eligible for subsidies, healthcare interventions, or skill programs before they request them.
- Second, behavioural personalization. Systems learning individual citizen preferences and delivering tailored experiences across DigiLocker, UPI, and government portals.
- Third, friction elimination. AI caseworkers handling routine approvals, document verification, and eligibility determination, freeing human officials for complex decisions.
This advancement introduces a critical challenge. Government Digital Twins (GDTs), AI abstractions of government employees managing these systems, become increasingly sophisticated. These twins operate with delegated authority and behavioural patterns. When compromised, they just don’t breach data but corrupt service delivery itself.
At TrendAI, we believe the next phase of DPI must embed security into AI and vice versa, from inception. Continuous behavioural validation, identity-level threat detection, and proactive exposure management become foundational to trustworthy citizen services.
Q2. As governments increasingly rely on digital platforms for governance and service delivery, cyber resilience has become a national priority. How can AI help secure critical digital infrastructure against emerging cyber threats while maintaining public trust?
Government agencies operating DPI face an evolving threat landscape. India continues to experience significant cyber threat activity, with recent industry reports estimating over 200 million threat detections across over 8 million endpoints, reflecting the growing scale and complexity of the cybersecurity challenge facing organizations today. State-sponsored actors increasingly target government, academic, and strategic institutions. Yet traditional cybersecurity approaches focus on systems and perimeters, missing a fundamental vulnerability of identity itself.
AI enables the shift to proactive resilience through three capabilities. First, continuous threat modelling, AI maintaining real-time digital twins of government infrastructure, simulating attack scenarios, and validating defense effectiveness without impacting production. Second, behavioural anomaly detection, establishing baselines for normal system operation and flagging deviations indicating compromise or unauthorized access. Third, automated threat response, AI correlating signals across endpoints, networks, cloud systems, and applications simultaneously, responding in milliseconds rather than hours.
The challenge intensifies because citizen trust depends on transparency. Citizens must understand that their data, accessed through government systems, remains protected against sophisticated threats. Yet traditional security is invisible because citizens don’t see the firewalls, monitoring, or incident response occurring behind their applications.
We believe cyber resilience requires making security visible and measurable. Continuous exposure management enables identifying vulnerabilities before attackers discover them. It becomes the foundation. We have TrendAI Vision One™, whose proactive threat intelligence and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities enable governments to demonstrate measurable risk reduction, transforming security from reactive incident response to predictive threat prevention.
Q3. Sovereign AI is rapidly emerging as a strategic imperative worldwide. What steps should countries in the India and SAARC region take to build indigenous AI capabilities, trusted data ecosystems and secure digital infrastructure?
Sovereign AI extends beyond building local LLMs or avoiding data export. For India and SAARC, it demands trustworthy infrastructure that citizens, regulators, and international partners depend on completely.
There are some foundational steps distinguish sovereign AI from merely indigenous AI. We need to establish indigenous AI research and development ecosystems. India’s AI research community generates world-class innovations, yet deployment often relies on international platforms and cloud providers. Building sovereign capabilities means funding domestic AI infrastructure, developing local LLMs trained on Indian data contexts, and creating vendor-independent AI operations. Modern organisations need to implement trusted data governance.
Sovereign AI requires clear frameworks defining data ownership, access controls, and citizen consent. Operationalization demands governance layers like data classification schemes, consent management systems, and audit trails proving data handling aligns with citizen expectations. We need to build threat intelligence and defense capabilities native to the region. Cyber threats targeting Indian government and critical infrastructure differ from global threat landscapes. Regional threat intelligence that understands attacks targeting India’s specific infrastructure, regulatory environment, and citizen services becomes essential for effective defense.
True sovereignty requires not just technology, but governance maturity and regional intelligence. Our proactive security architecture, combined with regional threat context, enables organisations to build AI infrastructure that remains under national control while defending against sophisticated threats.
Q4. Public-sector organisations often struggle to scale AI beyond pilot projects. What are the key barriers to enterprise-wide AI adoption in government, and how can leaders ensure measurable impact from AI investments?
The barriers are primarily organizational, not technical.
The first barrier is measurement ambiguity. Pilots often measure adoption metrics instead of impact metrics. Leaders need baseline establishment before deployment for example, quantifying citizen processing time, fraud incident rates, or operational efficiency. Without baselines, demonstrating ROI becomes impossible. The second barrier is governance fragmentation. Different departments procure AI systems independently, creating silos where data, models, and insights cannot flow across government. Fragmented procurement creates fragmented capabilities. The third barrier is skills misalignment. Government teams lack experience operationalizing AI at scale like managing model drift, retraining pipelines, incident response when AI systems malfunction. Pilot teams often include external consultants while production requires sustained internal capability.
We help governments overcome scaling barriers through integrated platforms providing unified visibility, automated compliance, outcome measurement, and incident response while ensuring AI investments deliver measurable citizen impact.
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Q5. Generative AI has the potential to redefine citizen engagement and government operations. Which real-world use cases do you believe can deliver the fastest and most meaningful improvements in public service delivery?
Generative AI delivers fastest, most measurable impact in three domains generating immediate citizen friction – administrative workflow automation, policy guidance delivery, and service request triage.
- First, administrative simplification. Citizens navigating government processes experience friction at multiple points for example, which forms to complete, whether they’re eligible, what documentation is required. Generative AI trained on official government procedures guides citizens through workflows in conversational language. Processing time transforms from days to hours; error rates drop through intelligent form verification.
- Second, policy guidance at scale. Government call centres overflow with routine inquiries from citizens asking about eligibility, scope of appeal and tax related obligations. Generative AI trained on official policy documents answers these questions 24/7, eliminating inquiry backlogs while improving citizen experience.
- Third, service request intelligent routing. Government agencies receive thousands of complaints, appeals, and requests monthly. Generative AI rapidly categorizes these by priority, jurisdiction, and required expertise. Urgent matters surface immediately; routine requests enter automated acknowledgment workflows.
These use cases share characteristics enabling rapid deployment around well-defined problems, available training data, measurable impact metrics. Most importantly, they do not require rearchitecting government operations rather they layer onto existing systems.
Q6. Looking ahead to 2030, what will distinguish a digitally resilient nation from the rest, and what should governments prioritise today to build future-ready, AI-powered public infrastructure?
Resilient nations in 2030 will be distinguished by their ability to establish effective AI guardrails grounded in a security-first approach. A fundamental shift in this would be preventing breached before they occur. Today, governments operate reactively, discovering breaches weeks later, responding through manual processes, validating outcomes through periodic audits. Resilient governments will operate predictively, detecting emerging threats in real-time, responding automatically, and maintaining continuous assurance that defences remain effective.
This shift requires foundational changes happening now.
- Establish continuous exposure management as policy standard, moving to real-time vulnerability discovery and automated remediation.
- Implement unified security platforms providing visibility across hybrid infrastructure
- Most importantly, embed transparency frameworks ensuring citizens understand how their data is protected, how AI systems remain accountable, and how governments respond when incidents occur.
The distinction between resilient and vulnerable is governance maturity. Nations that prioritize continuous defense, invest in unified infrastructure, and maintain citizen-centric accountability will weather emerging threats.
Q7. As Senior Director for Government Business, how is TrendAI positioning itself to support India’s AI ambitions and digital public infrastructure journey, and what role do you see the private sector playing in building resilient digital nations?
At TrendAI, we recognize that India’s government digitization is fundamentally about trust. Citizens trusting their data to government systems, government trusting AI to make decisions on citizen welfare, society trusting that digital infrastructure serves collective interests rather than narrow agendas.
Our positioning centres on embedding this trust into infrastructure itself. TrendAI Vision One™ provides government agencies real-time visibility into all systems operating across hybrid infrastructure, understanding what’s running, who can access it, how it behaves. This transparency is foundational to trust.
The private sector’s role is equally critical and often overlooked. Private companies like fintech platforms processing UPI transactions, healthcare providers accessing citizen health data, logistics operators routing deliveries, operate adjacent to government DPI. Building resilient digital nations requires government and private sector adopting consistent security standards, integrated threat intelligence, and unified incident response. Both public and private sectors should jointly build a national threat intelligence network providing actionable, real-time intelligence to all stakeholders. Periodic and realistic cyber exercises can help measure recovery and incident response capacity. This vision is attainable through sustained investment, public–private collaboration, and an unwavering commitment to proactive, intelligence-led defence
We are committed to enabling this collaboration through platforms and intelligence that serve both sectors seamlessly so that Indian organisations can scale AI fearlessly.