India’s MSMEs number over 60 million, employ nearly half the workforce outside of agriculture, and contribute close to 30 percent of the nation’s GDP. In many ways, they are not just a part of the Indian economy. They are its foundation.
For decades, running a small business in India meant navigating a maze of paperwork, compliance requirements, and limited access to capital, all while competing against larger players with far deeper pockets. But something has shifted. Digital tools that once felt out of reach have become genuinely accessible. Cloud platforms, digital payments, e-commerce storefronts, and mobile-first business applications have opened up possibilities that a previous generation of small business owners could not have imagined. And with that access has come a new kind of confidence, a sense that the playing field, while not yet level, is at least getting closer.
But digitisation is not without its complications. As MSMEs move more of their operations, their customer relationships, and their financial activity online, they are becoming increasingly visible to people who would like to exploit that. The threats are not always dramatic. They rarely announce themselves. A fake website here, a fraudulent domain there, a social media account impersonating a legitimate business. Sanjay Katkar, Joint Managing Director at Quick Heal, puts it plainly: most attacks do not begin inside an organisation’s network. They begin outside it, in the spaces that small businesses rarely think to monitor. For an owner juggling ten responsibilities at once, that kind of invisible threat is nearly impossible to catch before it causes real damage. A single incident of brand abuse or customer fraud can erode trust that took years to build.
The challenge, then, is not just getting small businesses online. It is keeping them safe once they are there, and making sure the technology they adopt actually works for them rather than adding to an already overwhelming list of things to manage. This is where the conversation around AI is getting interesting, and a little more honest. For most MSMEs, the question was never whether AI would change business. It was whether AI would change their business, in practical, everyday terms that actually made a difference.
Harsha Solanki of Infobip points to a problem that sits quietly behind a lot of ambitious digital strategies: channels that do not talk to each other. A customer reaches out on WhatsApp, follows up over email, and gets a completely different response each time because there is no single thread connecting those interactions. For a large company, that is a coordination problem. For a small business, it is a lost sale and a frustrated customer who does not come back. The opportunity that AI genuinely presents, Solanki says, is the ability to bring those channels together into something coherent, so that even a lean team can deliver an experience that feels connected and responsive.
That same spirit of doing more with less runs through what Brijesh Agarwal of Busy Infotech has been working on for years. Behind every small business, he says, is an owner wearing multiple hats, managing cash flows, navigating compliance, and still finding a way to grow. GST reconciliation and financial reporting should not be sources of stress for someone running a small enterprise. With the right tools, they do not have to be. AI-powered accounting, in his view, is not about replacing the human effort that goes into running a business. It is about freeing people from the tasks that drain time without creating value, so they can put that energy into the things that actually move the needle.
There is a broader question underneath all of this, one that Amit Relan of mFilterIt raises and that does not get asked often enough. Access to digital tools is valuable. But access alone is not the same as ownership. If small businesses are growing their digital presence on platforms that control their data, set the terms of their customer relationships, and capture most of the value being created, then the growth is real but the foundation is fragile. True progress for MSMEs in this era, Relan argues, means having a genuine stake in the digital economy, not just a seat at the table that can be taken away.
That argument resonates differently depending on which part of the MSME world you are looking at. Ravindra Singh of Delcom Telesystems operates in power transmission and distribution, an environment where the stakes of getting technology wrong are far higher than a missed sale or a delayed shipment. Surveillance gaps and network failures in critical infrastructure carry consequences that are difficult to reverse. His belief is that what separates companies in this space is not size but depth. MSMEs that combine genuine domain expertise with the ability to execute precisely are not vendors to the infrastructure projects shaping India’s future. They are partners in building something that lasts. Build deep, execute flawlessly, and let the work speak for itself. It is a standard that applies well beyond power grids.
What ties all of these perspectives together is something simpler than any single technology or policy. India’s small businesses have always found ways to adapt, to survive difficult markets, regulatory shifts, and economic uncertainty. What is different now is the scale of the opportunity in front of them and the sophistication of the challenges alongside it. The foundation is already there, sixty million businesses strong. What comes next depends on whether the tools, the protections, and the thinking around MSMEs can grow at the same pace as the ambition driving them.
