Budget 2026 Quietly Turns India Into An AI Control Plane Economy

When India’s Union Budget 2026 was tabled, much of the initial conversation revolved around headline numbers, sectoral allocations, and political signalling. But beneath the surface, a subtler shift is underway, one that reframes technology not as an enabler of growth but as the operating system through which growth is executed.

Here's Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, Salesforce South Asia, sharing her views on the Union Budget 2026: what really nails this shift is less hype and more hard truth about where India's tech story is headed.

“Budget 2026 represents India's transformation from technology consumption to AI-powered innovation, a blueprint for a $7 trillion economy built on intelligence, not just scale.”

What stands out is not the ambition of the number but the mechanism being proposed: intelligence embedded into economic infrastructure itself.

Cloud Tax Policy As Economic Architecture

The most under-discussed lever in Budget 2026 is not AI funding or skilling; it is the decision to extend a tax holiday on cloud services until 2047.

“The tax holiday until 2047 for cloud services is a masterstroke in data sovereignty, attracting an estimated $50 billion in data center investments by 2030 while positioning India as the cloud hub for emerging markets.”

Traditionally, tax incentives are viewed as temporary stimuli. Here, the unusually long horizon signals something else: cloud infrastructure is being treated as permanent national plumbing, similar to roads or power grids.

For enterprises, this changes the long-term calculus. A domestic-first cloud economics model allows Indian companies, especially SaaS firms and regulated enterprises, to architect systems without constantly arbitraging cross-border data costs. For global firms, it reframes India from being a deployment market to an operational base.

This is not about attracting hyperscalers alone. It is about anchoring decision latency, where data is processed, governed, and acted upon.

MSMEs Move From Credit Access To Execution Speed

MSME reforms in Budget 2026 are being widely read as liquidity support. That reading is incomplete.

“The ₹10,000 crore SME Growth Fund, combined with the TReDs platform mandate and expanded safe harbor thresholds, creates force multipliers enabling India's 63 million MSMEs to scale from survivors to global champions.”

The real shift is from credit availability to execution velocity.

By formalising invoice discounting and reducing compliance ambiguity, MSMEs are no longer forced to optimise for survival cycles. Instead, they can participate in predictable, machine-readable financial flows, something enterprise platforms have long relied on.

For B2B technology providers, this opens a new layer of opportunity: MSMEs that are structurally ready to adopt CRM, ERP, and AI-driven forecasting, not as aspirational upgrades, but as operational necessities.

Education To Employment As A Services Trade Strategy

One of the least examined announcements in the budget is the High-Powered Committee on Education to Employment.

“The High-Powered Committee on Education to Employment targets capturing 10% of global services trade by 2047, ambitious but achievable given our demographic advantage: 65% under 35, digital infrastructure like UPI and Aadhaar.”

This is not merely a skilling initiative. It is a services export strategy disguised as workforce planning.

The presence of platforms like UPI and Aadhaar in this context is telling. They are not welfare tools here; they are identity and transaction rails that allow India to participate in global services delivery with lower friction and higher trust.

For enterprise tech companies, this signals a future where India is not just a talent pool but a services execution layer embedded into global workflows.

AI As A Literacy Layer, Not A Luxury

AI announcements in government budgets often oscillate between grand visions and pilot programmes. Budget 2026 takes a different approach.

“Bharat-VISTAAR's multilingual agricultural platform and AI in school curricula show generational thinking, ensuring our demographic dividend becomes an intelligent dividend.”

The emphasis is not on frontier research but on distribution and familiarity. AI is being normalised early across language, education, and livelihood contexts.

This matters because enterprise AI adoption is constrained less by models and more by organisational readiness. A workforce that grows up interacting with AI systems reduces the friction enterprises face later when deploying automation, analytics, and decision-support tools.

The R&D Gap No One Is Closing Yet

Notably, Salesforce’s response does not shy away from a critical omission.

“However, the critical gap remains R&D investment, we risk becoming sophisticated consumers of AI rather than creators.”

This is the fault line in the budget’s technology story. While execution rails are being built aggressively, original IP creation remains underpowered.

For India’s enterprise ecosystem, this creates a paradox: world-class deployment capability paired with dependency on externally developed core models. Whether this gap is bridged will determine if India controls its AI stack or merely optimises someone else’s.

A Budget That Chooses Control Over Optics

“We see the Budget as a structural roadmap that creates an environment where technology, enterprises, and individuals can unite to collectively propel India's future advancement.”

Taken together, Budget 2026 reads less like a growth manifesto and more like a systems blueprint. Cloud policy defines where intelligence lives. MSME rails define how capital moves. Education reforms define who executes.

The emerging picture is of India positioning itself as an AI control-plane economy, one that may not invent everything first but is increasingly designed to decide, deploy, and scale faster than peers.

That shift, quiet as it may seem today, could prove to be the budget’s most enduring legacy.