Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said artificial intelligence is redefining what’s possible for India’s small businesses, giving them the capabilities once reserved for large enterprises.
By removing barriers to insights, capital, and operational efficiency, AI is enabling MSMEs to scale faster and think bigger, Sharma said.
Speaking at Shiprocket Shivir 2025, Sharma argued that many small businesses remain limited not by resources, but by mindset—and that technology is now shifting that equation.
“AI can be their business partner, CFO, even their analyst,” Sharma said in a conversation with Shiprocket CEO Saahil Goel. He stressed that many small sellers underperform simply because “they don’t know what they don’t know.” With personalised tech and automation, Sharma believes these knowledge gaps can now be bridged at scale.
“Small businesses are small because they think they are,” he said. “They’re just large businesses waiting to become large.”
He added that digitisation has already helped millions of traders leapfrog traditional barriers.
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At Shiprocket Shivir, CEO Saahil Goel unveiled a slew of AI-powered features, including a voice-based co-pilot that can complete tasks on Shiprocket’s platform on command.
Shiprocket also launched Shunya.ai, a sovereign, multimodal AI model developed entirely in India to serve the country’s micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and digital commerce ecosystem.
The model, which supports voice, text and image inputs across more than nine Indian languages, is being positioned as a foundational AI layer for Bharat-focused businesses.
There are two versions of the models: one with 15 billion parameters and another with 45 million parameters. The company claims that the model’s performance puts it among the top 5 LLMs available in the market.
Edited by Jyoti Narayan
