India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has welcomed the world leaders, captains of industry, innovators, policymakers, researchers, and technology enthusiasts from across the globe to the AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi.
The Summit, themed “Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya — Welfare for All, Happiness for All”, reflects India’s commitment to harnessing Artificial Intelligence for human-centric progress and inclusive development.
The Prime Minister highlighted the transformative role of AI across diverse sectors including healthcare, education, agriculture, governance, and enterprise. He expressed confidence that the deliberations at the Summit will enrich global discourse on innovation, collaboration, and responsible use of AI, shaping a future that is progressive, innovative, and opportunity-driven.
Prime Minister Modi underscored India’s leadership in the global AI transformation, powered by the strength of its 1.4 billion people, robust digital public infrastructure, vibrant startup ecosystem, and cutting-edge research. He emphasized that India’s strides in AI reflect both ambition and responsibility, positioning the nation at the forefront of technological advancement.
Sharing a thread post on X, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi wrote:
“Bringing the world together to discuss AI!
Starting today, India hosts the AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam in Delhi. I warmly welcome world leaders, captains of industry, innovators, policymakers, researchers and tech enthusiasts from across the world for this Summit. The theme of the Summit is Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya or welfare for all, happiness for all, reflecting our shared commitment to harnessing Artificial Intelligence for human-centric progress.”
“AI today is transforming several sectors, including healthcare, education, agriculture, governance and enterprise. The AI Impact Summit will enrich global discourse on diverse aspects of AI, such as innovation, collaboration, responsible use and more. I am confident that the outcomes of the Summit will help shape a future that is progressive, innovative and opportunity-driven.”
“Thanks to the 1.4 billion people of India, our nation stands at the forefront of the AI transformation. From digital public infrastructure to a vibrant StartUp ecosystem and cutting-edge research, our strides in AI reflect both ambition and responsibility.”
AI Impact Summit | Reactions from Industry
Manish Agrawal, President & COO of Comviva, said, “Across telecom, the biggest day-to-day AI impact is showing up in personalized customer engagement and network operations on how operators acquire customers, manage journeys, automate billing and revenue processes and detect risk, and shift operations from manual and reactive to predictive and intelligent. AI and GenAI are making these operations scalable by converting data and customer intent into actions: from next-best recommendations, to automated routing and self-healing exception handling that learns over time, so teams focus on high-value interventions rather than repetitive tasks.
At Comviva, we are embedding AI across our people, products and processes, infusing intelligent decisioning and automation into workflows across the customer touchpoints and digital channels. We are modernizing our platforms to be AI-first and cloud-ready for repeatable delivery at scale. Internally, we’re applying AI across engineering, support and security functions and already seeing measurable efficiency gains in support operations and productivity uplift for developers and testers, allowing us to innovate faster with higher resilience. We believe the winners will be those who will industrialize AI where it matters most: the workflows that connect experience, monetization and risk, with responsible governance and continuous improvement in production. That is how we see AI converting efficiency into sustained growth, beyond isolated pilots.”
Dr. Yajulu Medury, Vice Chancellor, Mahindra University, said, “Higher education is undergoing a fundamental structural shift as institutions move away from rigid, traditional workflows in favor of a more agile efficiency model powered by integrated AI frameworks. The core value of this technological evolution lies in its capacity to amplify human talent rather than substitute it. By expanding specialized data science and AI curricula, universities are prioritizing hands-on experience and interdisciplinary growth to prepare students for a complex landscape. This transformation is rooted in a data-driven ecosystem where every strategic decision is informed by analytics. Ultimately, the goal is to bridge the gap between technical proficiency and the essential human virtues of critical inquiry and creative problem-solving”.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Vice Chancellor, World University of Design, said, “For most people, AI isn’t about big ideas or futuristic disruption. It’s about the small, everyday moments at work. Writing a first draft. Making a presentation. Sorting data. Responding to emails. Planning a schedule. AI now does these in minutes instead of hours. What this has changed is not just speed, but how people spend their day. Less time goes into repetitive tasks, and more time goes into deciding, correcting, and improving. People are no longer stuck doing the same work again and again. They are spending more time thinking about whether the work makes sense in the first place. From a design perspective, this shift is important. Work has always had hidden inefficiencies. We waited for approvals, redid things because instructions were unclear, or followed processes that no longer served a real purpose. AI makes these gaps obvious. When routine tasks become easy, delays caused by confusion or poor coordination stand out clearly. AI also changes scale in a very practical way. One person can now do what earlier required a small team. This does replace people, but it also creates opportunities to change roles. Ordinary workers can become organisers, editors, and problem-solvers rather than just executors. In everyday work, AI is less about replacing humans and more about removing friction. The real gain is not just efficiency, but clarity. When tools become faster, people are forced to be clearer, more intentional, and more thoughtful about what they are doing and why”.
Dr. Anita Patankar, Executive Director, Symbiosis Dubai, commented, “Artificial Intelligence is reshaping everyday functions within the education sector by enhancing operational efficiency, supporting better decision-making, and enabling greater scalability. AI tools allow institutions to automate administrative work, streamline student services, and analyse academic data with higher precision. They also make it possible to tailor learning experiences to each student’s unique needs. For learners, AI contributes to improved outcomes by offering prompt feedback, academic assistance, and easier access to digital resources. For teachers, it lightens routine workloads, freeing them to concentrate more on instruction, mentoring, and research activities. At the organisational level, AI helps scale operations by making better use of resources and broadening access to high-quality education. Despite these advantages, it remains crucial to invest in continuous research to fully understand the long-term educational, social, and ethical effects of AI in the years ahead.”
Pankaj Malik, CEO and Whole-time Director, Invenia-STL Networks, said, “As India prepares to host the Al Impact Summit 2026, it signals a decisive shift from discussion to delivery. The focus now must be on how emerging technologies are deployed at scale, responsibly and with measurable impact across sectors.
For India, this is as much an infrastructure story as it is a technology one. Resilient core-to-edge architectures, strong data governance and automation-led operations will determine how effectively innovation translates into economic and societal value. With its digital public infrastructure and engineering depth, India is well positioned to shape a model of scalable, trusted digital growth that can inform global conversations.”
“At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, the defining shift was from experimentation to operationalisation. The real conversation is no longer about access to models or compute, but about embedding AI into core industry workflows at scale.
Across regulated sectors like capital markets, the bar is materially higher. Systems must be compliant, auditable and aligned with governance frameworks from inception. Infrastructure, policy clarity and workforce readiness are becoming as critical as technical capability. Competitive advantage will accrue to firms that can translate AI capability into production-grade systems with measurable outcomes.
In capital markets specifically, this means moving beyond analytics overlays toward AI-native operating layers that redesign document workflows, due diligence processes and transaction intelligence. The broader takeaway from the Summit is clear: India’s AI opportunity will be realised not through pilots, but through disciplined deployment into the economic rails that power growth,” said, Aman Singh, Co-founder, S45.
“The India AI Impact Summit 2026 stands as a pivotal moment in the global AI landscape, reinforcing India’s ambition to lead as an innovation hub. As AI becomes deeply embedded across sectors, the emphasis on safe, trusted, and responsible AI, supported by skill development and collaborative innovation, mirrors the essence of India–France Innovation Year 2026. This commitment will be instrumental in shaping resilient, future-ready ecosystems.
Thales’ AI is designed for critical applications, enhancing the performance of highly specialized systems in defence, aerospace, space, and cybersecurity with an exceptional level of reliability, transparency, and cyber-resilience. It is built to operate in technically constrained environments (limited embedding, power, and connectivity, classified training data) and under strict sovereignty requirements.We look forward to fostering collaborations with local industry, startups, and academia on AI, advancing global capabilities and contributing to a smarter, safer, and more sustainable world,” said, Ankur Kanaglekar, Vice-President – India, Thales.
India’s Blueprint for Indigenous AI Dominance
India’s technological landscape is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving from a consumer of global tech to a formidable architect of indigenous Artificial Intelligence solutions. This transition is not merely about adopting automation; it is a strategic play to build a sovereign, scalable AI ecosystem tailored to the subcontinent’s unique complexities.
At the core of this movement is the imperative for hyper-localization. Global AI models, trained on Western data sets, often falter when confronted with India’s linguistic diversity and socio-economic nuances. In response, the Indian enterprise sector is aggressively deploying “Bharat-specific” Large Language Models (LLMs).
Startups and research labs are developing solutions fluent in dozens of dialects, moving beyond text to enable voice-based interfaces that allow India’s non-English speaking masses to access digital services with the ease of a conversation.
These localized solutions are already penetrating critical verticals. In agriculture, AI-driven advisory services are providing micro-targeted crop insights to farmers via feature phones. In BFSI, vernacular AI chatbots are underwriting credit for rural borrowers lacking formal credit histories, using alternative data to assess risk. The healthcare sector is leveraging computer vision to screen for diseases in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities where radiologists are scarce.
Looking ahead, the future implications for the Indian market are profound. We are likely to witness the emergence of a “Public AI Infrastructure”—a digital backbone analogous to UPI, where AI models become a utility for solving public goods problems. However, this rapid ascent mandates a robust governance framework.
For businesses, the message is clear: to remain competitive in the Indian market, AI strategies must be built on the pillars of linguistic inclusivity and deep vertical integration, ensuring that the technology serves the many, not just the few.
