THE nation’s AI Impact Summit 2026 was billed as a coming-of-age moment for the country, as it seeks to enter the global artificial intelligence race dominated by the rivalry between the United States and China.
Instead, the summit presented a far more complex picture, underlining both the country’s ambition to innovate and bring leadership, and its constraints in terms of infrastructure bottlenecks and its dependence on foreign technology.
Logistical problems took some shine off the event. Glitches in accreditation, last-minute schedule changes, VIP movement cutting off access for participants and exhibitors, long queues within the venue and traffic jams took some shine off the summit.
An Indian university in a viral incident was evicted from the summit after one of its officials falsely claimed to Indian media that a Chinese-made robotic dog was its own invention.
In spite of all this, the message out of the summit was that India is open for AI business and is more than a market for tech giants.
“The whole intent and purpose was to really put on display India’s seriousness in the field of AI – both with regard to the creation of technology and the development of products, and the application of AI for tackling persistent larger economic problems and human development problems,” said Rentala Chandrashekhar, chairman of the Centre for Digital Future.
Despite “a lot of noise”, the message that India was pursuing these objectives came through, said Chandrashekhar, who was formerly the top official in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
Announcements of deals worth billions of dollars reinforced this message.
Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, who is Asia’s richest man, pledged investments of around US$110bil (RM429bil) over the next seven years to build AI and data infrastructure across India.
Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises said it would invest US$100bil (RM390bil) to build renewable-powered AI-ready data centres by 2035.
All this indicates that India has entered the AI race, said former minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who asserted: “The capacity and capability that exist in the Indian research and innovation ecosystems are solid”.
Chandrasekhar, a leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and former minister of state for electronics and Information Technology added: “We may have been a little late into the AI race, and we will need to do a lot of catching up.
India is ChatGPT’s second-biggest market, with 100 million weekly users.
But competition is heating up, with Indian startup Sarvam AI hoping to give generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude a run for their money.
One of the few domestically developed AI models showcased at the summit, it unveiled two models built and trained with local datasets, making them more culturally attuned to Indians in terms of languages and culture.
“The power in India is the population and the amount of data that you can drive to drive (AI) models. Think about it. AI has nothing without good data training it,” said Vanessa Smith, a speaker at the summit and chief corporate affairs officer at American company ServiceNow, which provides a cloud-based platform for automated business workflows.
India also has a proven track record of building IT services, which can be leveraged into AI systems. And any application developed in India can be exported to countries in the Global South, given the country’s diverse linguistic and cultural diversity, experts said.
At the summit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of how technology developed in India would help other countries as well, maintaining: “Any AI model that succeeds in India can be deployed anywhere in the world”.
Held in New Delhi from Feb 16 to 21, the summit is the fourth of its kind after similar annual conferences in the United Kingdom, South Korea and France to discuss the problems and opportunities posed by AI.
India is hosting the gathering at a time when AI adoption has accelerated across the world, raising questions over safety, job losses and ethics amid the rise of agentic AI systems.
Advances in AI have already rendered a number of jobs, including traditional white-collar roles, redundant. — The Straits Times/ANN
