SCSP Trip Report: India AI IMPACT Summit
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SCSP Trip Report: India AI IMPACT Summit
SCSP’s Rama Elluru and Nandita Balakrishnan recently returned from New Delhi, where they attended the AI Impact Summit in order to socialize SCSP’s and ORF America’s U.S.-India AI and Emerging Technology Compact, which we had released the week before the Summit, and participated in discussions on how AI is reshaping national security, how governments are building workable governance frameworks, and how countries are competing for and developing technical talent. Read more about their key takeaways from the trip, upcoming podcasts, and events below.
From Safety to Real World Impact: India Reframes the Global AI Agenda
By focusing on AI for impact at the core of its Summit agenda, India displayed itself as an AI player in the global ecosystem, rather than a mere adopter of technology, and made a decisive pivot in the global discourse on AI. India anchored the event in three foundational pillars: People (equitable access), Planet (climate resilience), and Progress (inclusive growth). With over 300 exhibitors and 300,000 attendees, the Summit functioned as a high-stakes showcase for how AI can solve systemic challenges in healthcare, education, agriculture, and more.
This gathering represented the fourth chapter in a global series that successfully moved the needle from abstract risk mitigation to tangible implementation. The journey began at Bletchley Park in 2023, which established the baseline for “frontier” AI safety, and evolved through the Seoul and Paris Summits, where the focus shifted toward international cooperation and inclusive innovation. In other words, the global debate had transcended what these tools could do, focusing instead on how nations choose to deploy them. By bringing the dialogue to the Global South, the New Delhi Summit continued this evolution by centering the needs of developing and emerging powers and the strategic necessity of adopting AI in ways that serve everyone.
India on the Global Stage: A Massive Public Undertaking to Democratize AI Access
The Summit showcased India’s AI capacity, where featured keynotes focused heavily on India’s specific trajectory, and the narrative consistently returned to the nation’s achievements. The Expo showcased not just Indian conglomerates like Reliance Industries and Jio next to Google, NVIDIA, and Meta but also highlighted the contributions of startups, government agencies, universities, and individual states. By positioning these domestic entities alongside global titans, the Summit demonstrated India’s intent to lead its own technological development rather than serving solely as a market for foreign investment.
The Summit and the accompanying Expo occupied the 120-acre Bharat Mandapam, which was originally built to host the 2023 G20. Hosting more than 600 startups and 13 country pavilions across five large and distinct halls, the event functioned as a high-energy industrial fair rather than a standard policy conference. While the themed zones—ranging from robotics to generative AI—successfully demonstrated the breadth of the ecosystem, the sheer volume of attendees from Delhi’s population led to frequent overcrowding. This logistical friction underscored the immense public interest in AI, even as it challenged the professional atmosphere organizers sought to maintain.
As the first Summit held in the Global South, the Expo was intentionally structured to elevate middle powers and emerging players. Two recurring themes were the need for affordable, low-compute access and the importance of AI systems that address diverse multicultural needs, particularly multilingual models. This approach challenged the traditional dominance of compute-heavy resources by proving that public value can be generated through localized, efficient innovation. For representatives from regions like Africa, the New Delhi location provided a level of accessibility and shared perspective previously absent from the global AI circuit. By centering on an AI for All framework, India pivoted the conversations in New Delhi toward ensuring that the benefits of innovation reach the broadest possible base of users, regardless of their geographic or economic starting point. As a practical matter with shifting demographic changes around the world, India is highlighting the Global South as critical partners and markets of the future that will shape the use cases of AI. And with recent reports that Chinese AI models, particularly Deepseek, are making rapid gains in the Global South, competing for access to these markets is something America and our partners must take seriously.
From Models to Markets: Use Cases and Human Capital
One recurring theme throughout the Summit was how India intended to be a dominant player in the AI space by leveraging its scaling and talent capacity to deploy AI use cases. At least for now, India’s AI strategy does not seem to be competing with the U.S. and China on the frontier models given its limited access to compute power. Instead, India is focusing on its applications, particularly on health, education, and agriculture. For example, at the Summit, India launched a new program, Bharat-VISTAAR, designed to help farmers leverage AI to get guidance on crop development and health. There were also demos of AI’s use in sports and the arts, including a demo for attendees to leverage AI as a cricket coach and one that brought the mythological tale, the Mahabharata, to life for children and adults alike.
Throughout the Expo, consistent messaging framed India’s vast, highly educated talent pool as its ultimate powerhouse, a claim physically manifested in dedicated areas on the Expo floor for AI literacy and upskilling. Leveraging its third-place ranking on the Global AI Vibrancy Index, India is strategically pivoting from a back-end service provider to the primary engine of allied AI expertise. By treating human capital as a concrete plan of action rather than a mere policy pillar, the Summit underscored India’s unique structural advantage: a young, mobile-first population poised to drive the “fifth industrial revolution” through a massive, tripling workforce that now serves as the world’s largest source of trusted AI talent. This focus on both beneficial use cases and talent is a striking contrast to a rising anxiety in Western countries regarding AI’s potential negative impacts on employment.
Looking Ahead to the Coming Summits
The Summit’s diplomatic centerpiece was the signing of the New Delhi Declaration on AI by 89 countries and international organizations, a document formalizing a shared commitment to AI as a tool for economic growth rather than a driver of inequality. By mobilizing nearly ninety nations and hundreds of thousands of participants, the Summit established the “Global Majority” as a center of gravity for AI adoption and the importance of application and model deployment, not just the pursuit of hyper-scaling models. Furthermore, by anchoring its strategy in sovereign talent and critical hardware alliances like Pax Silica, India has signaled its transition from a technology consumer to its ambitions to be a primary architect of the global silicon and AI stack. As SCSP and the Observer Research Foundation America have argued in our U.S.-India AI and Emerging Technology Compact, deepening America’s partnership with India in AI and tech will be in both nations’ interests as we seek to shape a future that reflects the interests of the two greatest and largest democracies in the world.
The AI Impact Summit marked the beginning of a new era of AI competition where deployment and impact must be goals that nations and companies track for their AI applications and models. As the baton passes to Geneva in 2027, it will be important for the Summit process to continue to look forward to consider further the positive impact we should seek AI to have on our world. It would be a step backward if as the Summit returns to Europe that it reverts an overly focus back to regulation and safety. And for both Geneva in 2027 and the UAE Summit in 2028, it will also be important not to lose sight of India’s vision of “AI for All” and a sustainable model of AI development, deployment, and adoption that can balance the needs of the developing world with the immense resource demands of the next technological frontier.
This trip report captures something the Western AI discourse consistently underestimates: India is not competing on models. It's competing on deployment at civilizational scale.
The Bharat-VISTAAR launch is a case in point. While Silicon Valley debates benchmark scores, India is building AI that advises 150 million farmers on crop health. That's not a use case. That's a national strategy executed through infrastructure the private sector alone would never build.
I've observed this pattern from the other side. I spent eighteen years at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, watching how nations with long time horizons approach technology differently than quarterly-earnings-driven markets. India's framing — People, Planet, Progress — reads like a sovereign wealth fund's allocation thesis more than a tech conference agenda. And that's precisely why it works. When you're thinking in decades rather than funding rounds, the question shifts from "who builds the best model" to "who deploys it where it matters."
Your point about DeepSeek gaining traction in the Global South is the signal that should keep Washington awake. The competition for the next two billion AI users won't be won on parameter counts. It will be won on accessibility, affordability, and respect for local context. India understood this before anyone else at the table.
One note: the mention of the UAE Summit in 2028 is worth watching. The Gulf states are positioning themselves not just as hosts but as the connective tissue between Western capability and Global South deployment — precisely because they sit at the intersection of sovereign capital, energy infrastructure, and geopolitical ambiguity.