For the first time, India convened the 360-degree global AI value chain in one integrated forum. Policymakers, model builders, deep-tech founders, industry leaders, skilling institutions, investors and representatives from around 118 countries came together to discuss foundational research, infrastructure, applications, workforce transitions and governance in a single strategic frame.
I overheard a founder say, “We found our tribe.” That sentiment stayed with me as it captured something important. Mature ecosystems are not built only on capital or talent; they are built on coherence. The summit created that.
Here are five shifts that the summit highlighted.
From data to compute to intelligence: For decades, globalisation has revolved around efficiency—nations have competed on scale, cost arbitrage and market access, with supply chains optimised for the lowest-cost producer. The digital era reframed the rules: data became the new currency, and platforms the new empires. Countries raced to amass information and compute power, turning hyperscale data centres and advanced semiconductors into strategic assets and geopolitical chokepoints. The AI Impact Summit 2026 marked the pivot to a third phase: competition centred on applied intelligence at population scale. The decisive frontier is no longer raw compute ownership, but embedding reliable, inclusive intelligence across economies and societies.
Just as digitisation captured records, integration linked systems, and analytics built insights, intelligence acts—it interprets, predicts and responds in real time (for example, forecasting district-level outbreaks and auto-allocating vaccines). Consultants estimate that AI could add $13-15 trillion to global GDP by 2030, but value accrues to those who integrate it at population scale in agriculture, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, governance and skilling. That is where the next competitive frontier lies.
From market to co-creator: Until now, India was framed primarily as a vast digital market, a formidable services base, and a successful digital public infrastructure story. Global technology discourse often positioned India as a user, an adopter, a scale consumer.
The summit signalled a significant shift in the narrative, reflecting that the world is increasingly moving from efficiency-first globalisation to resilience-first geoeconomics. And the shift was most visible in the changing conversations as the world’s most consequential AI leaders joined heads of state, ministers and delegates on Indian soil to discuss the way forward.
The conversations reflected recognition of India’s ambition to build across the full AI stack: energy, infrastructure, compute, models, applications, governance and skilling. Most interestingly, the language itself changed. Conversations moved from “India as our largest user base” to “How do we build with India?” A key discussion across the summit was how to participate in the development of the ‘India stack’.
It is not about control. India is positioning itself as a trusted, development-first AI partner, open to collaboration but clear in its ambition to build foundational capability at home.
From hype to diffusion: The third defining shift was the move from hype to diffusion. AI conversations are clearly moving beyond experimentation toward deployment. A walk through the expo showed how the focus has shifted to integrating AI across agriculture, healthcare diagnostics, education personalisation, logistics optimisation and judicial systems, resulting in very interesting and relevant questions such as how do we measure productivity gains? How do we ensure that deployment at scale remains responsible and inclusive?
The launch of the Global AI Impact Commons at the summit was a mega step forward in creating a common knowledge pool of best practices and know-how from across the world. The Commons brought together learnings and stories of impact creation from over 30 countries, reinforcing a critical thesis: AI leadership will be judged not by demos, but by diffusion.
Here, India holds a unique hand. We have four strategic convergences that are unmatched elsewhere. One, population-scale digital public infrastructure (Aadhaar, UPI, account aggregators, ONDC); two, high-frequency datasets from 1.4 billion citizens; three, a young, multilingual talent pool; and four, a development-first policy stance.
The rails exist; what we need to do now is layer on the inference engines. If done right, diffusion at India’s scale will redefine global benchmarks.
Legitimacy linked to workforce transitions: Across the world, AI’s credibility is increasingly tied to employment outcomes. The summit did not shy away from this reality. Rather than indulging in alarmist narratives about displacement, discussions focused on the details behind the hype: sector-wise assessments of AI’s impact, industry-linked reskilling pathways, modernisation of apprenticeships and the use of AI-enabled labour market intelligence to guide workforce planning. The emerging consensus was clear: AI strategy cannot be separated from workforce strategy. India’s demographic dividend gives it enormous potential, but potential alone does not guarantee dividends.
AI as a geopolitical lever: We are entering an era of fragmentation, where technology partnerships increasingly shape strategic alliances and national influence. The summit demonstrated India's unique ability to serve as a development-centric bridge—convening technology leaders, policymakers, innovators, and entrepreneurs from across ideological and economic divides on a single platform to speak a common language of alignment and human-centricity.
The summit's defining achievement—the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, now endorsed by around 91 countries and organisations—commits to the democratic diffusion of AI with actionable platforms like the Global AI Impact Commons (a shared repository for scalable, high-impact use cases), the Trusted AI Commons (tools, benchmarks, and best practices for secure, trustworthy systems), and an AI Workforce Development Playbook to drive reskilling and literacy at scale.
Add to this the strong emphasis on inclusion—spotlighting women founders and innovators through initiatives like the AI By HER: Global Impact Challenge, one of three flagship global challenges at the summit. It received over 800 applications across six priority themes: agriculture, education, health, energy and climate, cybersecurity and digital wellbeing, and open innovation/wildcard—proving that inclusion is a must if we want to shape AI not only as an economic growth engine but as a public good multiplier.
Defining moments usually become visible in hindsight. The India AI Impact Summit will likely be remembered for bringing ecosystem integration, narrative transformation, deployment focus, workforce alignment, and geopolitical positioning into one coherent arc—anchored in the three guiding sutras of people, planet and progress. The world came to India expecting scale. It left recognising strategy—and a bold vision for AI as a force for good that serves humanity, safeguards our shared home and drives meaningful progress for all.
(Views are personal)
Debjani Ghosh
Distinguished Fellow, NITI Aayog and former President, Nasscom