At the India Pavilion – the same stage where the G20 shifted global tectonic plates – India is preparing to host what is being seen as a “Bretton Woods moment” for the silicon age.
The India AI Impact Summit starting tomorrow will turn New Delhi into the center of gravity of the technology world. While previous summits at Bletchley Park, Seoul and Paris focused heavily on the “existential risks” of rogue algorithms, India’s pitch is decidedly more practical. In the eyes of the Modi government, AI is not just a boundary to be circumvented, but a utility to be deployed – the “electricity” of the 21st century.
For the global investor community, the stakes are binary. As AI begins to make a dent in the traditional margins of India’s $250 billion IT services sector, the summit represents New Delhi’s formal pivot from being the world’s “back office” to becoming its “AI laboratory.”
Power list: Silicon Valley descends on Delhi
The attendee list is like a who’s who of the generic AI boom: Sundar Pichai (Alphabet Inc.), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) are all set to attend. His presence – alongside heads of state including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Lula da Silva – underlined a shift in tech diplomacy: A global AI standard cannot take off without India’s 900 million internet users and its massive data drain.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has increasingly linked the goals of the Grow India 2047 to technological sovereignty, is expected to attend a series of closed-door “CEO firesides”.
IT Secretary S. “The key message is that AI needs to be human-centred. We are pushing for democratic access to resources. It’s not just about security; it’s about equity,” Krishnan told reporters ahead of the event.
‘Innovation-First’ principle
Investors are closely watching India’s regulatory trajectory. While the EU has opted for the “AI Act” – a dense set of risk-based classifications – and the US is relying on the market-driven executive order model, India is charting a third path: the development-first model.
New Delhi’s “innovation-first” approach suggests that regulation will remain “light-touch” until any specific harms are identified. It is designed to provide a “regulatory sandbox” for the country’s emerging startup ecosystem.
“If we need to legislate, we can do it quickly,” Krishnan said, “but our goal is to use existing laws to ensure we don’t stifle the innovation that will drive our growth.”
However, the industry is worried about the recent amendment in IT rules. Issues such as mandatory labeling of AI content, accountability for deepfakes and liability of platform providers are expected to be discussed during the high-voltage deliberations of the summit.
Sovereign AI and India Stack 2.0
A central theme of the summit is Sovereign AI. India is wary of “digital colonialism” – a scenario where a few Silicon Valley giants own the foundational models that power Indian healthcare, agriculture and finance.
To counter this, the IndiaAI Mission is capitalizing on local computing capacity and “AI commons”. Recently, PM Modi chaired a roundtable with 12 domestic startups, which focused on:
- Multilingual LLM: To create models who speak not just English but the 22 official languages of India.
- Vertical AI: Typical applications in health care diagnostics and engineering simulation.
- GenAI for Commerce: Using text-to-video and 3D modeling to digitalize India’s vast retail sector.
By creating an indigenous foundation model, India aims to ensure that its strategic sectors do not depend on foreign-owned black boxes.
Demographic growth versus fear of displacement
The summit comes at a time of jitters for India’s tech stocks. Markets have become volatile as investors evaluate the disruptive potential of AI against the traditional “linear growth” model of Indian software exports.
With 65% of the population under the age of 35, India’s demographic dividend is its greatest security. The summit will feature more than 700 sessions focused on “workforce readiness.” The goal is a sweeping reskilling pivot: moving millions of coders from “maintenance” tasks toward “AI-augmented” development.
The success of this change is important. If India can successfully integrate AI into its digital public infrastructure – the same system that underpinned UPI and Aadhaar – it could set the global standard for how a developing country leverages a generation of technological advances.
Global South Focus
It is the first major AI summit held in the Global South, and New Delhi intends to use the platform to represent the “global majority”.
Expected result? A joint declaration that moves beyond the “doomsday scenario” of Western laboratories and focuses on “AI for all”. Expect proposals for shared compute infrastructure and “trusted AI” tools that could be exported to other emerging economies in Africa and Southeast Asia.
