2 Indian Companies Riding The AI Wave Smartly

While India may lack a "Magnificent Seven" style AI hardware play, there are specialized companies already riding the wave - not by selling AI, but by embedding it into high -stakes industries.

Today, we will discuss two such candidates.

The first is Indegene, that claims to be an "AI-First" specialist in global life sciences industry.

Indegene is not your average IT firm. It has spent 25 years carving out a niche as a strategic partner to the global Life Sciences industry. Top 20 biopharma companies in the world are Indegene's clients.

The company helps these global giants navigate the journey from the lab to the patient. They handle everything except the actual manufacturing, basically taking care of sales, marketing, regulatory compliance, and drug safety.

Why is this an AI story?

Imagine a global pharma company operating in 60 countries with dozens of drug brands. It's physically and financially impossible for every individual brand team to build its own AI. Instead, the industry is moving toward centralised, enterprise-level platforms. Indegene is the architect of these platforms.

Take Pharmacovigilance or drug safety. Traditionally, this required an army of humans to read and classify thousands of safety reports daily. Indegene's AI now reads, classifies, and flags risks automatically, drastically reducing human error and cost.

In Scientific Writing, their GenAI tools are compressing the time it takes to create complex FDA submissions. This speed to market is worth billions in the pharma world.

The proof is in the productivity. Indegene's revenue per employee has jumped from US$ 56,000 to US$ 75,000 in just three years. That is a massive gain that traditional IT companies, burdened by legacy "bench strength," can only dream of.

Indegene isn't just using AI; they are using 30 years of proprietary domain data to create "human-in-the-loop" workflows that would be difficult for competitors to replicate.

The second is Affle 3I, that is turning attention to action in the marketing domain. For decades, advertising was a "visibility" game. You paid for a billboard or a TV slot and hoped people saw it. In the digital age, that shifted to "impressions" and "clicks." But as any marketer will tell you, a click isn't a customer.

Affle has built its entire moat on a different premise: The Outcome.

Over 99% of Affle's revenue comes from a performance-based model. They don't charge clients when someone sees an ad; they charge when someone does something that its clients want.

This action could be an app installation, an online purchase, or an event signup. This aligns their incentives perfectly with the brand. If Affle doesn't deliver, Affle doesn't get paid.

This "pay-for-results" model is powered by a massive AI engine. Affle analyses billions of anonymised data signals - predicting consumer behaviour and app usage patterns - to identify exactly who is likely to convert. The company isn't just guessing; it has a growing library of patents and is now integrating Gen AI to make ads creative even more personalised and effective.

As global ad budgets migrate from traditional media to digital "connected devices," the supply of ad space is exploding. Advertisers will naturally lean towards to the platforms that guarantee a return on investment. Affle sits at center of such model, particularly in high-growth emerging markets.

The Bottom Line

The AI wave is a "Creative Destruction" event. It will destroy the margins of companies that sell "hours" and create massive wealth for companies that sell "outcomes."

The AI landscape moves at breakneck speed. Disruption is the only constant.

Indegene and Affle represent a new breed of Indian tech - one that isn't nervous about AI, because they've built their business models around it.

This editorial does not imply any view on the stocks mentioned.

That said, these two candidates deserve to be on your watchlist with era of cheap labour transitioning to intelligent outcomes.

Warm regards,


Richa Agarwal
Editor and Research Analyst, Hidden Treasure
Quantum Information Services Private Limited (Research Analyst)