Walking through the high-security corridors of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, it was easy to get swept up in the polished rhetoric of ‘sovereign AI’ and ‘scaling sustainable AI infrastructure’. The summit was not just another stop on the global tech-circuit. It was a massive exercise in stress-testing India’s emerging AI strategy (and indeed, the world’s AI strategy) against the messy, complex reality of the Indian ground. It was not just a technology conference, but a national strategy session involving the judiciary, academia, farmers, students and global policymakers to shape India’s role in the AI-driven global economy.
Beyond the global ivory towers
For the past three years, the global AI narrative has been dictated by a handful of companies, AI labs and venture capitalists in San Francisco. Their concerns—largely centred on existential risks of AI or the race for more AI chips and data centres—often feel lightyears away from the immediate needs of an Indian small business or a district hospital in Bihar.
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 attempted to flip that script. While it welcomed the world’s experts to share their blueprints, the real value lies in moving beyond the global ivory towers of AI. AI doesn’t have to be a trillion-parameter behemoth to be useful. In India, ‘impact’ won’t be measured by how well ChatGPT can write a poem; it’s measured by whether an ASHA worker can use a vision-AI tool to screen for cataracts in a village with no stable internet.
The view from the trenches
The most significant shift at this summit was the move away from a ‘top-down’ mandate. Historically, tech policy of countries is decided by a few. But the summit offered India a chance to evolve its own AI strategy in a truly ‘bottoms-up’ manner. The presence of some 2.5 lakh registrants meant that the AI conversations in the corporate boardrooms of San Francisco, Paris and Bengaluru were tested and given a reality check by the mass consumers of AI.
As S. Krishnan, secretary in the ministry of electronics and IT, put it, the summit was an opportunity to ‘let a thousand ideas bloom’. It gave an opportunity to hear from clerks and young advocates in the trenches about the crushing weight of millions of pending cases and difficulty of translating legal documents in multiple languages. Instead of dreaming about ‘AI judges’, the AI strategy for the legal sector focused on AI as a multilingual translation layer and a document-summarisation tool—boring or underwhelming perhaps for some, but revolutionary for a litigant waiting a decade for a hearing.
A two-way learning street
India is currently in a unique ‘goldilocks’ position. We have the data—vast, diverse and representative of a billion plus users—and we have the talent. The summit was a two-way learning street. Global tech giants and the world’s AI researchers saw how AI performed in unstructured environments, and not just the labs. For the world, the real learning is about what the citizen truly needs. For India, the real learning is what the rest of the world—from Brazil to Kenya and Japan to the US—is doing.
For the over 600 startups that showcased their applications across health care, education, agriculture and other sectors, as well as the creators of OpenAI, Claude, Sarvam and other prominent AI models, the summit was an opportunity to see how their products were actually serving the consumers on the ground.
For the consumers, it provided a platform to voice their needs and the constraints they were facing in their daily work, and also learn how AI can help them. This ‘rubber-hits-the-ground’ approach means acknowledging that if an AI algorithm provides a farmer a faulty recommendation, there must be mechanisms to feed more local context into the model, or for AI companies to build smaller, agriculture domain-specific models to supplement the general large language models.
India’s AI strategy as a living document
The summit should not be remembered for its MoUs or its fancy dinners. It should be seen as a ‘living strategy document’. The true evolution of our strategy cannot—and it must not—happen in ministry corridors. It must evolve by building constant feedback loops between the coders in Bengaluru and San Francisco and the doctors in Bhopal and the teachers in Mysore.
India’s AI future is not about being an ‘AI superpower’—it is about being the most human-centric, yet competitive AI ecosystem of ideas. And for that, it will need to hear from both the world’s best thinkers and practitioners of AI on one hand, and the thousands of consumers on the other, to evolve its own path forward.
Anirudh Suri is author of The Great Tech Game: Shaping Geopolitics and the Destinies of Nations, and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie India. He also hosts The Great Tech Game Podcast.