India is irrelevant to the AI revolution and that could doom its stock markets for the next decade, warns Wisdom Hatch founder and finfluencer Akshat Shrivastava.
In a detailed LinkedIn post, Shrivastava warned that Indian equity markets are likely to underperform over the next 10 years because India is not central to the global AI revolution.
“The next 10 years are going to be challenging for Indian stock markets,” he wrote. “Why? Because India is not needed in the AI race.”
Shrivastava argues that innovation—not geography or population—is what truly drives economic prosperity. “Wealth does not appear out of thin air. It is systematically built on the back of technological innovation,” he stated, citing past examples from Dutch shipbuilding to the UK’s Industrial Revolution to U.S. factory automation.
According to Shrivastava, innovation historically follows a hub-and-spoke model. “There will be 1–2 main hubs. These create prosperity around the world,” he noted.
India thrived as a spoke in the U.S.-led IT services model in the 2000s. But that model, he warned, doesn’t apply to the AI era.
“AI is shaping almost everything as we speak—from giga-factories to space exploration, energy requirements, and personalized learning,” he said.
In this new technological order, the U.S. and China are clearly the hubs, heavily investing in infrastructure, compute power, and energy reserves.
India, on the other hand, lacks both cost advantages in production and a large base of high-paying consumers.
“Why is India needed in this AI race?” he asked rhetorically. “We can’t build giga-factories, we don’t have low energy costs, and our per capita GDP limits our ability to be a premium market.”
While he acknowledged that India’s standard of living will likely improve as global productivity rises, he stressed that “compared to other countries, it will fall.” He predicts isolated domestic growth stories—like drone deliveries by Zomato—but cautioned that these are exceptions, not indicators of broad-based market strength.
The clearest signal, he said, is in capital flow. “There is a reason why since 2020, FIIs [foreign institutional investors] have been consistently exiting our markets,” Shrivastava pointed out.