Market for apps, funding pitches to precede policy declaration at AI summit

Three previous AI summits have been held so far—the first in the UK in 2023, followed by South Korea in 2024 and France in 2025. While each produced policy declarations, none were binding or led to an actionable outcome in international collaboration or to an impact on private companies.

Industry stakeholders said in the absence of a binding international coalition and prevailing geopolitics, India’s biggest victory at the ongoing summit will be to showcase startups and private enterprises working on AI to global investors, and to attract global business for data centres and AI applications.

As a result, discussions around a policy consensus could take a back seat.

“Given the current geopolitics, the way to go for most countries is a sovereign approach to artificial intelligence—and not globally distributed," said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at consultancy firm, Gartner. “As a result, a policy consensus, while likely, is not going to be binding on companies—and will thus not be the most effective. We’ve seen the same happen at the three previous editions as well."

A single global policy is usually difficult to achieve because different countries have different problems, different resources, and different aspirations, said Ankush Sabharwal, founder of CoRover AI and Bharat GPT.

“Rather than producing binding global laws, these summits should be seen as platforms where countries can bring not only problems but also innovations with regard to AI," Sabharwal said, adding that the AI summit that India is hosting gives an opportunity for the global South to redefine its standing in the world.

India’s AI Impact Summit is the fourth major AI conference since the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which made artificial intelligence a household name. Through this week, New Delhi is fielding the who’s-who of the global technology ecosystem—including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Soft power

While countries including France, the US and even China are expected to be in attendance, the larger focus at high-level executive discussions is set to be on enterprise collaborations, as detailed in the AI Impact Summit’s five-day agenda.

Stakeholders, as a result, expect the summit to be a showcase of India’s soft power in the global technology ecosystem—instead of seeing the birth of a G20-like framework for global collaborations.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his eight-minute keynote at the AI Action Summit in France last year, had made a clear, concise pitch for India to play a big role in the global AI ecosystem. The current summit is a manifestation of this pitch, playing out through possible collaborations in AI infrastructure and applications," said Kashyap Kompella, veteran technology consultant and founder at consultancy firm, RPA2AI Research.

“There will undoubtedly be challenges in terms of India being behind the curve on AI model development when compared with China and the US, but the Summit is likely to show to the world’s biggest executives where India’s private enterprises stand in terms of AI and business readiness, and the open markets ecosystem that India presents to global players," Kompella added.

Over a dozen firms, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia, Big Tech firm Google, and AI upstarts Anthropic and OpenAI, are expected to make announcements around products and associated businesses catering to India.

Also present at the venue will be India’s top technology outsourcing firms, which since the start of this calendar year have collectively lost over ₹4 trillion in market value as the US-based AI upstarts showcased advanced automation capabilities.

At a pre-summit press briefing on 29 December, S. Krishnan, secretary at the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity), had said, “The idea would be to sign a definitive declaration, and the idea to sign a policy agreement that allows for a collaborative approach to regulating AI in a unified direction is also on the cards."

“Our efforts at the AI Impact Summit will be to arrive at a consensus, and also to showcase some of the foundational models that startups funded by the AI Mission have been working on," he had further added.

This, however, is likely to be overshadowed by Friday, when the summit wraps.

The Bletchley Park Summit in the UK, the first of this nature, saw nations agree to set up national AI safety institutes that will push the barrier of progress on safeguards in AI products, Gartner’s Verma said. "While these institutes did come up, they did not become universal standards, as the development of AI is based on what private companies are currently undertaking. A policy directive, as a result, will be down the pecking order in India’s pitch for AI leadership to the world."

The summit opened on Monday at the Centre-owned Bharat Mandapam convention centre in New Delhi, to expectedly heavy footfall. Whether companies find it a success in the long run will only become clear as the Summit enters its final days.