National Technology Day 2026: As AI transforms shopping, trust becomes the real currency

Three years ago, a technology platform's success was measured almost entirely by how fast it could grow. Today, the metric quietly keeping CEOs awake is something far less glamorous: reliability. Not innovation theatre or funding rounds, but whether an order arrived as promised, whether a recommendation was accurate, or whether a first-generation digital shopper in a Tier-3 city received the same quality of experience as a power user in n urban++ area like Bengaluru, Mumbai, or Delhi. As the industry marks National Technology Day, this shift, from hypergrowth to accountable scale, is the story that the numbers are beginning to tell.  

India's digital commerce market is valued at USD 185 billion in 2026 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 15.7% through 2036. A significant 41% of Indian consumers are already using AI-powered shopping tools, the highest proportion of any market studied globally, with a further 40% set to follow. And yet, even as the numbers climb, a more complex truth is emerging beneath the surface. The era of growth-at-all-costs is giving way to something harder to build and far more valuable to own. Call it the Trust Economy. 

Three in five new e-retail shoppers in India since 2020 have come from cities designated Tier-3 or smaller. And 60% of new sellers since 2021 hail from Tier-2 or smaller cities. India's next consumer is not the digitally native metro resident who has been using quick commerce since its launch. She is the first-generation digital shopper navigating an interface designed for someone else, encountering recommendations calibrated to someone else's data, in a language that may not be her own. 

But inclusion in the technology economy is not only about who can access a platform. Increasingly, it is about who can access the devices that make participation possible in the first place. This is where a quieter but equally significant shift is underway in how India thinks about technology consumption itself.

Raghavendra Singh, CTO of Cashify, sees a fundamental change in consumer orientation taking shape. "People's perceptions of technology are clearly changing as India's digital landscape expands. Buying the newest gadget is no longer as significant as using it with greater efficiency and increasing its lifespan." Singh points to refurbished devices and recommerce as a structural driver of this change, one that cuts e-waste, brings down costs, and puts premium technology within reach of consumers who could not access it earlier. "We're seeing India move from owning devices to optimizing them."

The numbers behind this shift are not trivial. India saw over 150 million smartphone shipments last year, according to Counterpoint and IDC estimates, while a significant share of older premium devices remain unused after upgrades. Cashify alone has handled over 8 million device transactions, a figure that signals not just commercial volume but a reorientation in how value is understood in the technology economy. As Singh puts it, "Every iPhone someone trades in becomes another person's first premium phone. Every old laptop becomes a student's shot at opportunity." That is responsible innovation expressed not as a policy document but as a transaction.

This inclusion problem, both at the platform and device level, is what the industry is only beginning to confront with seriousness. Every personalization engine, by its nature, optimises toward the most engaged and most profitable user. The risk is the quiet creation of a two-tier digital marketplace, where the algorithm's sophistication deepens the divide between those it knows well and those it barely sees.

Ajay Kharbanda, CEO of Arinox AI, is direct about what this means at a national scale. "Technology that cannot be trusted cannot be scaled. And technology that cannot be deployed sovereignly cannot be called strategic." For Kharbanda, India's AI ambitions demand more than imported intelligence running on foreign clouds. They demand systems that are accountable, auditable, and built to serve the full spectrum of the population, including those on the edge of digital access.

Praveer Kochhar, Co-Founder and CPO of KOGO AI, puts the challenge in terms of a single defining question the industry must ask itself. "Are we building AI that serves everyone or only those who can really afford to lead?" Kochhar argues that the future belongs to those building what he calls governed intelligence, systems that are private by design, accountable by architecture, and inclusive by intent. "India is in a unique position. We have the talent, the scale, and increasingly the indigenous capability to not just adopt global AI but to define what responsible AI looks like for 1.4 billion people."

Ragini Varma, Chief Business Officer for India at Fynd, sees this as the fundamental test of the current moment. "What separates innovation from simple adoption is intent: the commitment to building technology that is responsible, inclusive, and rooted in real-world impact. In retail, AI is empowering brands of every scale to become more intelligent, agile, and consumer-centric." For Varma, India's digital growth story will ultimately be defined not by how boldly it innovates, but by how meaningfully that innovation reaches and benefits people across every tier.

Marketing in the Age of Intelligent Commerce

The disruption extends well beyond operations and infrastructure. For the marketing and advertising community, AI is rewriting the fundamental mechanics of how brands communicate, when they show up, and whether that showing up is welcomed or resented.

Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, now accounts for almost 40% of e-retail shoppers in India. This cohort has grown up with personalised digital experiences and holds considerably higher expectations for relevance. Broad demographic targeting, the historical default of Indian brand strategy, is rapidly losing ground to intent-based engagement, where AI reads behavioural signals in real time to determine not just what to show, but when and in what context.

Vishal Rajani, Founder and CEO of Synergos, describes the shift as a fundamental change in what technology's role in marketing actually is. "For years, technology in marketing was largely about efficiency. Better targeting, faster execution, refined analytics. But AI is changing the role technology plays altogether. We are now living in the era of intelligent marketing, where brands can move beyond broad audience assumptions and understand customer needs in far greater depth, not over weeks or months, but in real time."

Rajani identifies India's diversity as both the challenge and the opportunity. In a market where audiences differ dramatically across language, region, culture, and consumption behaviour, traditional marketing models often struggled to create relevance at an individual level. AI changes that equation, enabling brands to dynamically adapt communication for different consumer journeys without losing authenticity. "By the next National Technology Day, we will likely be discussing advancements that may seem unimaginable today. That is the pace at which technology is evolving and influencing every facet of business."

What this means, in practice, is that the creative brief and the data brief are converging. The media plan and the personalisation strategy are no longer separate documents. The brand's tone of voice and its recommendation algorithm must speak the same language. The marketing function that treats these as separate disciplines will find itself structurally disadvantaged against one that has brought them together.

The Trust Architecture Ahead

India's quick commerce market is expected to grow from USD 5.38 billion in 2025 to USD 9.77 billion by 2029, with the number of users projected to reach 60.6 million. That growth will not be captured by the platforms with the most aggressive discounting or the fastest promised delivery windows. Sustained market share, as the current evidence increasingly suggests, will be won by platforms that have built what might be called a trust architecture: the ensemble of operational systems, governance frameworks, and inclusive design principles that together make a platform consistently dependable for the most diverse possible range of users. 

This is the new strategic battleground. Not the consumer-facing product feature or the marketing campaign, but the invisible infrastructure underneath, the forecasting accuracy, the catalog integrity, the data governance, the accessibility of the interface, the fairness embedded in the recommendation engine. The global AI market is valued at USD 391 billion in 2025 and projected to reach USD 1.81 trillion by 2030. India's share of that future will be determined not just by the scale of its ambition, but by the depth of its accountability. 

National Technology Day 2026 arrives at an industry in transition. The question it poses is not whether AI will reshape commerce. That has already happened. The question is who that reshaping will serve, and whether the industry has the maturity to answer honestly.