Mitesh Khapra, an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2025. This recognition places him alongside global AI leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Khapra's inclusion in the list stems from his pioneering work in making AI accessible to India's 1.4 billion people in their own languages. TIME has recognized Khapra as someone whose work and research are reshaping academic research in AI within India.

Khapra's journey in AI began with his recognition of the significant gap in Indian language technology compared to English, primarily due to the lack of sufficient data for Indian languages. To address this, he co-founded AI4Bharat in 2019, a research lab at IIT Madras dedicated to creating open-source datasets, tools, and models for Indian languages.

AI4Bharat embarked on an ambitious project, sending researchers to almost 500 of India's 700 districts to record thousands of hours of voices from people with diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. This initiative aimed to capture all 22 of India's official languages, ensuring that AI models could effectively understand and process these languages. The open-source dataset created by AI4Bharat now supplies 80% of the data for the Indian government's Bhashini program, which uses AI to help citizens access digital services in their native languages.

AI4Bharat's AI models have already been deployed in various sectors, including the Indian Supreme Court for translating official documents and a voice bot that helps regional farmers report issues with government subsidy payments. Furthermore, AI4Bharat is partnering with Sarvam AI to develop India's first foundation model for the Indian government.

Khapra sees the creation of indigenous AI models as crucial for India's sovereignty, stating that it prevents the country from being perpetually dependent on foreign technology. He has also observed a shift in Indian academic research, with more students now focusing on Indian problems due to the availability of these datasets.

Before joining IIT Madras, Khapra was a researcher at IBM Research India, where he focused on machine translation and deep learning. He received his PhD and MTech degrees from IIT Bombay and has been awarded several honors, including the IBM PhD Fellowship, the Microsoft Rising Star Award, and the Google Faculty Research Award. His research has been published in top conferences such as ACL, NeurIPS, and AAAI.

Khapra's work extends beyond academia. He is also associated with One Fourth Labs, which develops learning content on AI and supports organizations in adopting AI solutions.

Mitesh Khapra's recognition in TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI highlights the importance of developing AI solutions that cater to the unique needs and languages of diverse populations. His work with AI4Bharat is paving the way for a more inclusive and accessible AI ecosystem in India.