Global Leaders Convene at AI Impact Summit in India
Tech executives, politicians, scientists, academics, and campaigners are gathering this week in India for the AI Impact Summit to engage in high-level discussions on guiding the AI revolution responsibly.
The event began amid long queues and some confusion among delegates, alongside conflicting reports about whether keynote speaker Bill Gates would attend.
Initial reports suggested the Microsoft founder, who has recently faced scrutiny due to his appearance in the Epstein files, might not address the Summit.
However, the Gates Foundation later confirmed to the BBC that he will deliver his keynote as planned.
This situation illustrates how the objectives of this Summit, like previous ones, can be overshadowed by external events.
Significance of the Summit in the Global South
Voices on AI are predominantly loud in the West, particularly the US and Europe. Therefore, it is notable that this gathering of influential leaders is taking place in the Global South, a region at risk of lagging in the AI race.
At last year's AI Action Summit in Paris, a contentious power struggle emerged among Western countries vying for leadership. US Vice President JD Vance delivered a forceful speech asserting America's non-negotiable position at the forefront.
In contrast, this week’s Summit in Delhi, the capital of India—a country that has contributed foundational technology to AI but has not gained proportionate benefits compared to wealthier Western nations—may exhibit a more modest tone.
India hosts significant AI hubs in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, with a large technology workforce and substantial infrastructure investments from companies like Google, Nvidia, and Amazon.
Simultaneously, low-paid Indian workers have long performed the meticulous task of manually categorizing vast datasets used to train AI systems worldwide.
Journalist Karen Hao, in her book Empire of AI, describes an unnamed Indian firm contracted for content moderation of AI-generated images, where workers reviewed disturbing content to determine what should be blocked from reproduction.
According to Glassdoor, the average annual salary for an AI data trainer in Chennai is 480,000 rupees—less than £4,000 ($5,000).
This role is vital, yet to contextualize, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is valued at over $500 billion.
AI Adoption and Language Challenges in India
The 2026 International AI Safety Report states that while over 50% of populations in some countries use AI, adoption rates in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America likely remain below 10%.
Many of the largest US AI chatbots do not support all of India’s 22 official languages, let alone the hundreds of dialects within them. Currently, ChatGPT and Claude support approximately half of these languages, while Google's Gemini supports nine.
"Without tech that understands and speaks these languages, millions are excluded from the digital revolution - especially in education, governance, healthcare, and banking,"said Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya from IIT Mumbai in an interview with the BBC last summer.
To address this, India is developing its own sovereign AI platforms under the government’s AI Mission, though progress remains relatively slow.
While US and Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and ByteDance rapidly release new AI products, many Indian initiatives are still under development.
India’s government budget for this project is $1.2 billion, which is modest compared to the vast resources of multinational corporations.
India’s Focus Beyond Geopolitical AI Rivalries
Before Christmas, an Indian government official expressed that India has limited interest in AI’s geopolitical power struggles, focusing instead on leveraging the technology for national growth.
"For India, this is about more than technology, it is about economic transformation, digital sovereignty and building capability at scale,"said Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV, one of India’s largest tech investors.
"Within the country there is a strong sense of momentum and confidence."
The US may find itself in an unusual position of reduced influence, which is unlikely to be welcomed.
"The Americans will have less to say with the Summit's proposed bottom-up, Global South approach to AI governance that focuses on people, planet and progress,"stated Professor Gina Neff, an AI ethics expert at Queen Mary University London.
"We need governments to act together to shape a more inclusive, democratic and people-centred vision of AI in the face of unprecedented corporate power,"argued Jeni Tennison, executive director of the think tank Connected by Data.
"As the world's largest 'middle power', India could make that happen,"she added.
AI expert Henry Ajder expressed hope for pragmatic collaboration.
"I hope we will see pragmatic efforts to move beyond a legislative patchwork towards meaningful consensus in addressing AI harms, maliciously caused or otherwise,"he told the BBC.
Amanda Brock, chief executive of OpenUK, a tech industry body, advocates for transparency.
"For this summit to have any real impact for the Global South, there needs to be access for all to AI and that can only be achieved by opening it up,"she said.
While some progress has been made, many AI companies continue to keep critical aspects, such as training data, confidential.
Concerns Over AI Safety and Summit Outcomes
Several AI experts have privately expressed concern that safety and responsibility have diminished in priority on the Summit’s agenda.
Following the inaugural AI Safety Summit in the UK in 2023, the term "safety" was quietly removed from the event’s title. One expert revealed they chose not to attend the Delhi Summit due to skepticism about meaningful results.
British computer scientist Professor Dame Wendy Hall, who is attending the Summit, shares these apprehensions.
"It's important that we go but my expectations of anything useful coming out of it are very low,"she said.
"I fear there will be 'nothing significant' from the event about how to minimise the dangers posed by AI."
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