At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, where many pathbreaking technologies made their debut, Intel highlighted its “Frugal AI” approach, designed with an aim of making artificial intelligence practical, efficient, and scalable across India.
The company said the right infrastructure must match the workloads it supports. Its Frugal AI approach focuses on distributed computing across PCs, edge devices, and localized systems instead of relying solely on centralised cloud infrastructure.
According to Intel, the AI uses heterogeneous architectures combining CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and other accelerators, designed to improve performance per watt and per rupee.
Intel’s silicon-to-system strategy, the release added, optimises performance and power efficiency, making AI adoption practical and resource-conscious for India while enabling sustainable scaling within cost and infrastructure limits.
AI PCs for active creation
Intel, which has been present in India for 37 years and operates its largest engineering center outside the United States in the country, said it is playing a key role in designing next-generation AI-ready client platforms.
These devices allow on-device AI processing with improvements of 50 per cent or more in CPU and graphics performance, along with significantly higher NPU efficiency—making AI workloads feasible without discrete GPUs.
On-device AI also supports privacy-preserving, real-time inferencing, reducing dependence on the cloud.
Intel noted that AI PCs can power emerging use cases, including agentic AI, deepfake detection, AI-driven content creation, and custom AI assistants. Lower system costs and power requirements, it added, make scalable AI adoption more accessible for students, enterprises, and developers.
Expanding access for education
Intel highlighted the gap in India between connectivity and digital fluency. While smartphone penetration is at 95 per cent, PC penetration is only about 9.9 per cent, limiting hands-on learning, coding, design, and AI experimentation. Only around 20 percent of Indians are proficient in computer use.
The company said that moving from digital literacy to digital fluency requires consistent access to PCs in classrooms and homes.
Collaboration across OEMs, ISVs, educators, and edtech partners is crucial to make AI-powered learning personalised, vernacular, and outcome-driven.
Intel further said that expanding affordable PC access is key to democratizing education and building India’s future-ready talent pipeline.
