From February 16 to 21, 2026, New Delhi's Bharat Mandapam became the centre of the global AI policy conversation. India's AI Impact Summit drew heads of state, UN leadership, and delegations from more than 100 countries.
6L+
In-Person Attendees
9L
Virtual Views
100+
Country Delegations
$200B+
AI Investment Commitments
Who Was in the Room
Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted the summit with French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as keynote participants. Twenty international organisations sent delegations.
Why India, Why Now
Developer Scale
India produces more software engineers annually than any other country.
Digital Public Infrastructure
UPI, Aadhaar, and DigiLocker demonstrate India's ability to deploy digital systems at population scale.
Geopolitical Neutrality
India's strategic autonomy facilitates dialogue between US-aligned and non-aligned tech ecosystems.
Data Diversity
Training AI on India's linguistic and cultural diversity produces more inclusive models.
The Bharat Mandapam summit marks the moment when AI governance stopped being a conversation between a handful of wealthy nations and became genuinely multilateral.
Our work on projects like Radiant Finance and TalkDrill reflects exactly the kind of AI-augmented, India-built software that the summit's investment commitments are designed to accelerate.
For Indian Founders: Watch for follow-on government programmes from the summit — particularly around AI compute subsidies and export market facilitation. Several commitments are expected to translate into specific schemes within 90 days.
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IndiaAI PolicyGlobal SouthAI InvestmentSummit
