India’s street entrepreneurs hold key to AI’s real use

A Wall Street Journal essay by Kimberley Strassel argues that innovators build for people like themselves, missing problems only grassroots entrepreneurs see. Indian entrepreneurs running small businesses, autos or shops already understand informal credit, local supply chains and agricultural distress, problems that credentialed professionals rarely touch. They lack only the technical capability to act on that knowledge.

Early tools show the shift is possible. AI4Bharat's Jugalbandi lets rural citizens check government scheme eligibility in their language via WhatsApp. Digital Green's Farmer.Chat gives smallholder farmers agronomic advice without waiting for an extension officer. The piece argues that AI can make expertise abundant for the small entrepreneur, letting her analyse sales, identify profitable products, draft loan applications and build a website, work that once required a team of specialists.

India does not need to find founders the way venture capital does, the essay says. The founders already exist, the task is to make them capable. Success should be measured not by training numbers but by how many more businesses start, grow and solve problems that matter to them, a metric called entrepreneurial velocity.