Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026 — alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi and global technology leaders — N. Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons, made a statement that deserves to sit on every business owner's desk.
"AI is the next big infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of intelligence. It will have a very profound impact, exactly the same way in the past other infrastructure changes have done — steam engines, electricity or the internet." — N. Chandrasekaran
This is not a technology prediction. It is a historical observation. Every era-defining infrastructure change has divided businesses into two camps: those that adopted early and built on it, and those that hesitated and spent years catching up. Steam engines separated artisanal workshops from industrial manufacturers. Electricity separated the illuminated from the dark. The internet separated the connected from the invisible.
Getting Everyone Ready — Including Your Organisation
What made his address particularly striking was the second part. Beyond the macro vision, Chandrasekaran spoke about the organisational imperative: the job at hand is to get everyone excited and ready for AI, irrespective of whether they are blue-collar or white-collar workers.
Readiness is the operative word. Not excitement, not awareness — readiness. And readiness has a prerequisite that is almost never discussed in the same breath as AI: data infrastructure.
The Tata Group is adopting AI across the full stack — from hardware to systems to data centres to applications. What that phrase 'across the stack' means for a conglomerate of Tata's scale is the same thing it means for a financial services SMB in Kolkata or Mumbai: you cannot deploy AI at the application layer if the data layer beneath it is broken.
Infrastructure Thinking for Every Scale of Business
One of the most important insights from Chandrasekaran's address is that infrastructure thinking is not exclusive to large enterprises. When electricity became available, it was not only Tata Steel that benefited. Every factory, every office, every business that connected to the grid gained a productivity advantage. AI infrastructure will follow the same pattern.
At Prayaas DataTek, we believe that automated data pipelines are the data infrastructure equivalent of connecting to the grid. They ensure that your business data — from transactions, operations, customer activity — flows continuously, cleanly, and in a form that AI tools can actually use.