Ola’s Krutrim AI Assistant Kruti Goes Offline, Signaling Deeper Challenges in India’s AI Bet

Key Pointers

• Ola’s AI assistant Kruti has gone offline across web, app stores, and integrations.
• The company hasn’t shared a clear reason, beyond a maintenance message.
• The outage raises concerns around funding, layoffs, and execution issues at Krutrim.

Ola’s AI ambitions have hit a visible roadblock.

Kruti, the consumer-facing AI assistant from its AI arm Krutrim, has suddenly gone offline across the web, app stores, and even Ola’s own ecosystem. Users trying to access it are either seeing errors or a basic message saying the service is under maintenance.

That’s not normal.

Because Kruti wasn’t just another feature. It was positioned as India’s answer to global AI assistants, built on a 12 billion parameter model and designed to handle real-world tasks like booking cabs, paying bills, and ordering food through natural language.

And now it’s gone.

No detailed explanation. No timeline. Just silence.

Kruti Vanishes Across Platforms Without Notice

Everything stopped at once.

Kruti is no longer available on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. It has also been removed from the Ola platform where it was previously integrated, and its standalone website either shows errors or a vague maintenance message.

That scale matters.

Because outages usually affect one layer. Maybe the app. Maybe the backend. But when everything disappears together, it signals something deeper than a routine technical issue.

So what’s happening here?

Right now, no one outside the company knows for sure.

What Kruti Was Built to Do

Kruti wasn’t just a chatbot.

It was designed as an agentic AI system. That means it could take actions, not just respond. Users could ask it to complete tasks, and it would plan and execute them step by step.

Here’s what it offered.

Capability	What It Meant
Task execution	Book rides, pay bills, order services
Multimodal input	Accept text, voice, and images
Multilingual support	Worked across Indian languages
Integration	Connected with Ola ecosystem

It launched in 2025 with a clear goal.

Build a local AI assistant for India, tailored to language diversity, mobile-first usage, and real-world needs.

That ambition was bold. But execution is harder.

The Bigger Problem: Execution, Not Just Outage

The outage is just the surface.

Behind it, there are signals of deeper issues. Reports point to layoffs across Krutrim, including teams working on linguistics, which are critical for training Indian language models.

That’s a red flag.

Because multilingual AI is resource-heavy. It needs constant data, training, and fine-tuning. If those teams shrink, progress slows down quickly.

There’s more.

• Senior-level exits have been reported
• Fundraising has faced delays
• Product adoption has remained limited

And perhaps most telling.

Work on the next-generation model, Krutrim 3, has reportedly stalled.

Put all that together.

This doesn’t look like a simple maintenance break. It looks like a pause.

Why Building an India-First AI Stack Is So Hard

The idea was ambitious.

Krutrim wasn’t just building an app. It was trying to build a full-stack AI ecosystem including models, cloud, chips, and applications.

That’s massive.

And expensive.

Here’s where the challenge lies.

Challenge	Why It Matters
Compute costs	Running large models needs expensive GPU infrastructure
Multilingual data	India’s language diversity increases complexity
Product-market fit	Users need clear, consistent value
Competition	Global players already have mature systems

Each of these slows things down.

And when they combine, momentum drops fast.

What This Means for Ola and India’s AI Ecosystem

This isn’t just about Kruti.

It reflects a larger truth. Building AI products at scale isn’t just about launching fast. It’s about sustaining performance, reliability, and user trust over time.

And that’s where many startups struggle.

Krutrim became India’s first AI unicorn in 2024, raising $50 million and setting big expectations.

But expectations don’t build products.

Execution does.

Now the focus shifts.

Can Ola stabilize its AI roadmap? Will Kruti return stronger? Or is this the beginning of a strategic pivot?

Right now, there are more questions than answers.