Six categories of AI excellence that will define India's most prestigious AI awards in 2026

Financial services generate more data per transaction than almost any other industry. Most of it goes underused. AI products in this space are changing how banks assess credit risk, how payment platforms detect fraud in real time, how insurers price policies and how wealth managers generate advice at scale. The organisations building here are sitting on some of the most defensible datasets in the country, and the products emerging from that advantage are redefining what financial services can deliver to 1.4 billion people. ​Most Innovative AI Product for BFSI, FinTech and Payments covers banking, insurance, lending, payments, wealth management, compliance and fraud monitoring. If your product is operating anywhere inside that stack, this is where it belongs. Healthcare decisions carry consequences that most industries never have to reckon with. That is precisely why AI products built for this sector require a different standard of reliability, accuracy and explainability. The products getting traction in Indian healthcare are reducing diagnostic turnaround times, improving drug discovery pipelines, automating clinical documentation and bringing specialist-level analysis to geographies where specialists are scarce. The challenge has always been building something that works under the constraints of the Indian health system: fragmented records, varied infrastructure and a patient population that is vast and diverse in equal measure.

Products that have cracked any part of that problem, across diagnostics, MedTech, clinical research or patient care, deserve to be in this conversation. Manufacturing is a business that operates on slim margins. A production line that stops for six hours, a supply chain disruption that was not foreseen two weeks in advance, a quality defect that reaches the customer: each one of these has a cost that multiplies quickly. AI products in Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Industrial Operations are tackling predictive maintenance, demand forecasting, quality inspection, inventory optimisation and supplier risk in manufacturing, logistics, procurement and industrial operations. India's manufacturing sector is at a scale where even marginal efficiency gains translate into significant outcomes. The products working on those gains belong at a national awards platform. Every organisation that has adopted AI has also increased its attack surface. Threats are evolving faster than human analysts can stay ahead of.​ AI products in Cybersecurity, Risk and Responsible AI are moving from reactive to anticipatory – spotting anomalies before they become breaches, automating threat response, mapping vulnerabilities across complex enterprise infrastructure and developing the governance frameworks necessary for responsible AI deployment. This category also includes AI governance, explainability, fraud prevention and privacy issues that are becoming increasingly central to how regulators and boards think about AI adoption in India.

In the next three years, the organisations that have built defensible, explainable and secure AI systems will matter far more than those that just moved fast. Every organisation that has adopted AI has also increased its attack surface. Threats are evolving faster than human analysts can stay ahead of. AI products in this space are moving from reactive to anticipatory – spotting anomalies before they become breaches, automating threat response, mapping vulnerabilities across complex enterprise infrastructure and developing the governance frameworks necessary for responsible AI deployment. This category also includes AI governance, explainability, fraud prevention and privacy issues that are becoming increasingly central to how regulators and boards think about AI adoption in India. In the next three years, the organisations that have built defensible, explainable and secure AI systems will matter far more than those that just moved fast. This category has no sector constraints and the highest stakes. ​Most Innovative AI Product of the Year recognises the single best AI product across all 16 categories: the one that best demonstrates originality, business impact, scalability and real-world application. It is open to breakthrough innovations in multimodal AI, foundational models, deep-tech AI, autonomous intelligence or next generation AI capabilities.

If you’ve got something that is unique from everything else in the market, this is the category to make that case. Nominations for the ET Most Innovative AI Product Awards 2026 are open. Don't miss out on the spotlight.