ICAI plans to provide financial data for India’s sovereign AI model
Chartered accountants' apex body ICAI is in discussions with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to provide financial and economic data of listed companies for India's sovereign Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. The ministry is working to develop the country's own large language models (LLMs). A senior functionary at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) said the institute plans to provide financial and economic data of listed companies to the LLMs (large language models) that will be developed in India. ICAI, which also plays a key role in taxation and financial matters, has more than four lakh members. On October 10, Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said India's sovereign AI model is expected to be ready before the AI Impact Summit in February next year. The government will be organising a two-day India AI Impact Summit 2026 on February 19 and February 20 next year. ICAI has started using AI in its activities to help its members in auditing work. Among others, AI can automate repetitive tasks, enable continuous auditing, and perform data analytics for fraud detection and risk. The ICAI functionary also said the institute is working on ways to tackle online and digital frauds and hoped that around 25 per cent of such frauds can be reduced with its efforts.
Swadeshi Zoho goes viral
Zoho-backed homegrown messaging platform Arattai has topped 7.5 million overall downloads as on Friday, marking one of the fastest adoption feat for a local app in recent times. The viral streak comes amid clarion calls by ministers, founders and CEOs to embrace the Made-in-India messaging app, the rapid daily sign-ups that followed, and widespread sharing and invitations circulating on social media platforms, including ironically, various WhatsApp groups. According to the company, Arattai has touched 7.5 million overall downloads (7.5 million accounts registered overall) as on October 3, 2025, including Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store. Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu in an X post on Sunday detailed the homegrown engineering frameworks that run Arattai. In the post, Vembu said he had advised his team to resolutely stay course, and not allow praise, criticism nor fame to distract. Further, the framework allows for distribution of the workload among many servers and databases, and provides fault tolerance, performance monitoring, security, he explained. Over the last few days, the homegrown messaging app (Arattai means 'casual chat' in Tamil) has gained ground as secure, user-friendly alternative to WhatsApp, after Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw, Piyush Goyal, and Dharmendra Pradhan publicly endorsed it, bolstering its visibility and credibility.
Indian market’s shift towards premium devices
QualcommChipset major Qualcomm expects shift of the Indian market towards the premium device segment will drive adoption of the company's latest and premium smartphone processor Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the country. Qualcomm Technologies Group General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Alex Katouzian said that India has become a prime market for the company as it is gaining from the Government's push for manufacturing, artificial intelligence and active involvement of home grown companies like Flipkart, Lenskart etc. "I think the Indian market is turning more and more into a premium tier. So I think (Snapdragon) 8 Gen 5 will get accepted quite a bit. The reputation of Snapdragon in India is really good. Recently we got data that we are number one in branding as well," Katouzian said. According to CyberMedia Research, Snapdragon commands 40 per cent market share in smartphones above `25,000 segment. Qualcomm at its annual flagship event Snapdragon Summit launched its latest chipset Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform — the world's fastest mobile system-on-a-chip with CPU processing speed of up to 4.6 gigahertz in prime cores, GPU (graphics processing unit) speed of 1.2 Ghz per core. The CPU in the new processor has eight cores, which include 2 prime cores with top speed of 4.6 Ghz and six performance cores of up to 3.6 Ghz. The chipset has three slots of GPU that can clock the top speed of 1.2 Ghz per core.
