IIT Madras Professor Mitesh Khapra Named Among TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI

New Delhi: Mitesh Khapra, Associate Professor at IIT Madras, has been featured in TIME magazine’s prestigious 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI). Sharing the spotlight with global figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Khapra has been recognised for his pioneering research in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, with a strong emphasis on Indian languages.

Unlike many others on the list who head AI corporations, Khapra’s work is largely academic. He is the co-founder of AI4Bharat, an open-source initiative that develops tools and datasets to make AI more inclusive and accessible in Indian languages. According to TIME, nearly every Indian startup working on voice technology for regional languages relies on the datasets built by Khapra and his team.

Western AI models often perform well on widely represented languages such as Hindi and Bengali but falter with underrepresented ones. To bridge this gap, Khapra’s research group spearheaded a large-scale project that spanned nearly 500 of India’s 700 districts, recording thousands of hours of voice data from people of varied educational and socioeconomic backgrounds to represent all 22 official Indian languages.

His contributions have played a central role in the Government of India’s Bhashini Mission, which seeks to deliver digital services in local languages through AI. Even global technology giants leverage AI4Bharat datasets to enhance their models for languages like Hindi and Marathi.

Reflecting on this transformation, Khapra told TIME:

“Fifteen years ago, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would mostly focus on English-related problems. But now, with the availability of these datasets, I see a shift—Indian students are increasingly working on challenges specific to Indian languages.”