The venue matters in Delhi. When the architecture tends towards grandeur, expect the signalling to match up. When Bharat Mandapam fills up, the Republic is rarely discussing potholes or the price of tomatoes. It is usually dealing with the grand arc of a nation’s destiny—preferably in bullet points and with a catchy logo. This time, it’s not just one nation but all of humanity that’s searching for a Noah’s Ark.
From February 16-20, destiny answers to the name ‘India AI Impact Summit 2026’. It’s an attention-grabber. Presidents, prime ministers and sheikhs from the terrestrial world will shake hands with heads of state from a stateless Xanadu. Crewneck-clad aristocrats like Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai will be there. And the older Bill Gates, who needs a bit of ayurvedic ego massage after all the stress of being named in the Epstein files.
Listening to them will be delegates from a hundred countries: local industry barons, mandarins and policy mavens, tech researchers and evangelists, as well as the occasional professional sceptic. Thank god for the last one. For, the general picture will somewhat resemble the famous photo from Hamburg 1936. They will be discussing machines that learn and humans who nod. Everyone will be nodding. We need at least the odd head that shakes.
Why will everyone be nodding? Because no one knows any better about AI. Even the top frontier researchers in artificial intelligence haven’t the foggiest about how the darn machine thinks. But they know how to make them, and make them bigger and bigger, even if we need to blow up the earth to produce enough energy to run them. Maybe that’s what they mean by ‘technology solution’. Just look at the future plans of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. They’re not planning on hanging around for too long.
So when do we secede from reality too? We could ask ChatGPT. For the record, India has a ‘knowledge partner’, one of the Big Four in global consultancy. Another one from that elite set was recently caught peddling a report written by ChatGPT to the Australian government, so whatever they say must be right. You must practise nodding, perfecting the form. It’s a critical future skill.
It’s still not clear who owns the copyright to something written by an AI model. The end-stage author? The platform? The LLM? Or a mashed up collective of dead authors? That’s why policymakers will promise ‘guardrails’, the fashionable new word. Entrepreneurs will promise ‘disruption’, another word that went from negative to a positive in management jargon but is again looking menacing. Somewhere between keynote optimism and panel fatigue, India will attempt to narrate its transition—from a hive of software drone bees to a ‘cognitive power’, powered by chyawanprash.
We have announced our ‘arrival’ before. The IT revolution, such as it was, gave us global recall and the Americans made enough sitcoms with Indian tech bros that they’ve shut down H-1B visas. But digital payments still gives us bragging rights—even if it’s just based on standard open-source web plumbing, no one can do scale like India can, can they now? Thank bad governance from the past for the failure of population control missions. That’s our tech edge.
But artificial intelligence is different. Did any doomscrolling of late? The shock and awe was not coming from dockyard workers or tendu patta pluckers. It’s AI workers who were sounding the alarm. They’ve just arrived at the shattering realisation that their everyday office job consisted of making the tools for their own obsolescence. The coders are the new dodos. Masters of enterprise resource planning are the proofreaders. Not too long ago, they were the bride. SaaS bhi kabhi bahu thhi.
For three decades, India’s superpower aspirations rested on evocations of this transnational ‘creamy layer’. But AI may turn that into Dalda. Our tech giants, denied the low-hanging fruit on which they made their billions, are hoping to scramble atop the gravy train by “integrating AI” into their product suites. Maybe they can fool our local barons for a while. Truth is, even our ‘sovereign AI’ is just repurposed open-source AI. No point screaming about who discovered zero first. We are in danger of rediscovering it.
But wait. There’s hope. Suddenly our greatest historic inconvenience—too many languages, too many behavioural patterns, too many ways of cooking the khichdi—is beginning to look like strategic depth. What planners once called chaos, AI engineers now see as ‘training data’. We are the oil.
So the summit will speak of multilingual AI, inclusion, digital public infrastructure, ethics. But underneath it will be a slightly affronted national pride: the future should not arrive in India subtitled. We should at least dub it. You must not miss the irony that will float unsaid, but politely present, over the proceedings.
For centuries India valorised simple living because it went with high thinking. Thinking was not about productivity. It was immersion. Participation. Debate was not a television programme to be monetised. It was a good in itself. Disagreement was at the heart of our civilisation. That’s what made the world listen to us. With liberalisation, thinking became employability, learning became mobility, knowledge became competitive advantage.
Artificial intelligence may now make it optional. The best hope right now is that we can somehow make a blockbuster pastiche of the world’s best. The Sholay of AI, if you will. Nod if you like.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor