Conferences are a dime a dozen, but few are as geopolitically significant as the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. Set for late February, this is not a glossy trade show with ugly booths and free T-shirts. It is a strategic gathering of the war council for AI’s future. India is playing host to executives from the ‘old boys’ club of Silicon Valley and the new stars of the SaaS (Software as a Service) world. Their goal? How to embed AI into public infrastructure without breaking democracy or privacy.
Why India? Why Now?
There is no coincidence that this summit is taking place in India. It is the country with the world’s largest dataset — 1.4 billion people coughing up digital exhaust in the form of UPI payments, telecom usage, and e-commerce transactions every second. For A.I. models that starve when they don’t get data, India is an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Yet beyond the numbers, India is aggressively vying to become a leader along the “Global South” axis of tech regulation. “Europe has the AI Act (tight regulation), the US has a market approach (light touch), and India is finding its unique middle path: ‘sovereign AI.’ The goal is to operate AI infrastructure — computing power, models, and applications — owned and controlled domestically, rather than rented from foreign conglomerates.
The Agenda: Public Infrastructure
The Indian agenda is refreshingly pragmatic compared to Western summits that can obsess over Generative AI making art or writing code. The emphasis is on “niche AI tools in public infrastructure.” We’re also talking about AI that optimizes traffic grids in real time to reduce pollution, triages patients in rural clinics that lack enough doctors, and instantly translates government notices into 22 languages. The executives landing in India today aren’t merely peddling chatbots, after all; they’re trying to become the architects of the Indian state’s operating system.
The Tension in the Room
And a not-so-secret elephant in the conference hall: Regulation. The Indian government has sent a clear message that it will no longer allow Big Tech to operate without restrictions. One of the major concerns is over deepfakes influencing elections and algorithmic bias harming the poor. The world’s tech giants are walking a tightrope. They covet access to India’s market and talent pool, but they worry about heavy-handed local laws that would require them to store data in the country or disclose their source code.
A Pivot Point
This summit is the pivot point. For decades, technology went in one direction: It was created in the West and consumed in the East. Now, the talk is of co-creation and customized deployment. And if those contracts we signed in February were successful, then we might just be at the outset of the first large-scale supervision of AI for anything other than optimizing ad clicks for the top 1%, but rather to actually improve the quality of life of the bottom billion. That the world is watching New Delhi, and that these rules could very well set a template for the entire developing world.
