India’s next wave of app innovation is being built with AI at its centre—and Google is placing its biggest bet yet on the founders leading that charge. On August 3, 2026, the tech giant unveiled the 2026 cohort of its Google Play Accelerator India, selecting 20 AI-powered startups for a three-month, equity-free programme designed to help them scale from domestic success stories to globally competitive products.

The enterprise software market has a long-standing reputation for inertia. For over a decade, the customer relationship management (CRM) landscape has been largely unchanged, with legacy vendors like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Zoho controlling the majority of the market. This has left enterprise sales teams burdened with systems that function primarily as “systems of record”—places where data is manually entered rather than intelligence being actively generated.