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Lawyer and technologist Utkarsh Saxena has found a place on TIME’s 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI, recognised for his work bringing artificial intelligence into India’s overburdened court system. Here’s what to know about him.
A Start In Indian Courts
Saxena began his career as a law clerk to Justice D.K. Jain at the Supreme Court of India, after completing his law degree from Delhi University. His first case as a clerk involved a man who had spent more than 12 years in prison awaiting trial, a case the court eventually turned into a wider inquiry into judicial delays. He went on to practise for years across district courts, high courts and the Supreme Court, and was also a petitioner in the case seeking legal recognition of same sex marriage in India.
From Harvard To Building Adalat AI
Saxena later studied at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, and worked as an economics research fellow at MIT. But it was his years inside Indian courtrooms that stayed with him the most. As he put it, the process itself had effectively become the punishment. In 2023, along with engineer Arghya Bhattacharya, he founded Adalat AI, a legal technology nonprofit built to ease the clerical bottlenecks slowing down India’s justice system.
Built For Indian Courtrooms
Adalat AI trains its speech recognition models specifically on Indian languages, dialects and legal terminology, aiming to cut down the time judges and clerks spend manually recording and transcribing testimony. According to the company, its programmes have benefited more than 6,000 courtrooms across 11 states so far.
Recognition On A Global Stage
Saxena’s inclusion on TIME’s list places him among a small group of Indian and Indian origin professionals shaping the global AI conversation, spanning fields from enterprise technology to healthcare and courts. His presence on the list reflects a wider shift, showing how AI is increasingly being applied to specialised institutional workflows well beyond frontier AI labs, including legal documentation and court processes.
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Khushi Patel is a Senior Sub Editor at NewsX, covering automotive, technology, Lifestyle, entertainment, and mainstream news. She previously worked as a Copy Editor at Times Network and has written automotive editorial content, including comparison pieces, for TimesDrive.
