Each of the three things runs on a model: the Hindi answer on a language model, the car's voice assistant on a voice model and the warehouse robot arm on a model that controls the machine, and the companies here build those models.

Across this collection, many Market Segments note how AI models are changing their industry. In this one, the model is the industry. It covers the companies whose product is the model itself: the language model, the voice model, the vision model, the robot's brain. They build it, train it and sell it as the product, not as a feature inside something else. The largest of these are called foundation models: very large models trained on a very wide range of data, which other companies then build their own products on. The buyers are companies that build products on top of the models, such as carmakers and call centres, and governments.

This is a very small Market Segment: six companies in Bengaluru. That smallness is the most important fact here. The models most of the world uses are not made by the companies in this Market Segment:

• OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral are not covered in this Market Segment.
• Google (with Gemini), Microsoft and Meta (with Llama) are covered elsewhere. (More on them in Google, Microsoft and Meta, in the big-tech collection.)

What is left is India's own attempt at a language model, and three voice companies that chose Bengaluru for their engineering. There is also one company at the frontier of the field, building a model for robots.

Models applied to one particular job are covered with that job:

• AI agents that talk to customers, in Market Segment 15.2, Conversational AI for customer service (in Industry Vertical 15, Customer service and CX)
• software that analyses customer calls, in Market Segment 15.3, Conversation intelligence and speech analytics (in Industry Vertical 15)
• AI assistants that write code, in Market Segment 6.4, AI coding tools (in Industry Vertical 6, Devtools companies)

The tools that train, run and test models are covered in the next Market Segment, 9.2, The plumbing for models.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.