AI Impact Pre-Summit 2026 reinforced India's emerging leadership in shaping AI as a public good rooted in equity, affordability, and real-world impact

The day-long event, themed "Building Inclusive AI for India and the World: Uplift. Empower. Enrich.", witnessed vision-setting keynotes to sectoral panels and live showcases of AI in action, spanning governance, education, healthcare, agriculture, and research.

Ashutosh Dutt Sharma, CEO, IHFC-IIT Delhi, set the context for deep collaboration between research institutions, industry, and public systems, underscoring that AI must move beyond experimentation to deliver measurable societal outcomes at scale.

In the inaugural keynote, Building Inclusive AI for India, Shashi Shekhar Vempati, Co-Founder, AI4India, highlighted the urgency of addressing India's distinct challenges, linguistic diversity, unequal access to compute and data, and growing employability anxieties among youth.

"There is a lot of anxiety globally about AI taking away jobs. What we need to address is the anxiety our youth feels about employability. Preparing students and employers for an AI-driven future is not optional anymore," he said.

During Pre-Summit AI4India's report was launched titled, Future of Employability in the Age of AI, which examines how AI is reshaping jobs, skills, and institutions, while outlining pathways to build a resilient, AI-ready workforce for India.

Education reform emerged as a central theme. Prof. M Jagadesh Kumar, IIT Delhi, emphasised the need to rethink learning models for the AI era, stating that India must "redesign the education system so that we don't just create AI users, but AI builders," and that teachers must evolve into mentors of curiosity rather than content deliverers.

The role of AI in governance was highlighted by Rajit Punhani, CEO, FSSAI, who shared how regulators are leveraging AI to anticipate risks. "We have shifted from reactive enforcement to predictive management because of AI," he noted, pointing to early intervention as a powerful governance tool.

Panel discussions deepened the focus on inclusion and scale. The session Uplifting Every Indian with AI explored people-trained AI and trusted datasets, with Lalitesh Katragadda, Founder, Indihood, noting that India's diversity cannot be engineered in isolation. "AI that works for India must learn from the people themselves," he said. Aman Mittal, Joint CEO, MITRA, Government of Maharashtra, highlighted the importance of "golden data" and cited early state-level leadership in building high-quality datasets for public use.

The panel Empowering a Billion Indians with AI brought together leading academics who stressed hands-on learning, problem-solving, and India-specific datasets as critical enablers. "AI should be viewed as a skill, not just a tool," said Dr. Ramanand, Director, CPRG, while Prof. Santanu Chaudhury underlined the need for publicly accessible datasets to unlock inclusive innovation.

Industry perspectives reinforced the importance of affordability and access. Gokul Subramaniam, President, Intel India, highlighted opportunities in sectors such as agriculture and stressed frugal innovation. "From the moment we look at a problem, we must focus on affordability to make solutions truly impactful in a country like India," he said.

The Pre-Summit also featured live showcases from startups and ecosystem players demonstrating AI applications in mapping, life sciences, education, and research, offering tangible evidence of how AI is already delivering value across sectors.

The summit called for sustained collaboration to ensure that AI in India is built not just for scale, but for trust, equity, and long-term national impact--setting the stage for deeper global engagement at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. (ANI)