What to Expect from the India AI Impact Summit 2026
The India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi represents a pivotal moment in the global AI dialogue, marking the first time this summit series will be hosted in a developing economy. Taking place from February 16-20, 2026 at the Bharat Mandapam, this international gathering aims to chart a path towards a future where AI delivers transformative impact that serves humanity, advances inclusive growth, fosters social development, and promotes people-centric innovations that protect our planet.
This insight highlights the expected topics to be discussed at the upcoming AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. Please note that techUK’s Sue Daley OBE, Sabina Ciofu and Tess Buckley along with our delegation will be on the ground, if you would like to join us you can learn more here. As we did for the Paris AI Action Summit, you can expect daily updates and insigths from the ground to be shared on the techUK website and LinkedIn pages.
The techUK team would like to know if any members will be attending. If you or your teams plan to be in New Delhi for the Summit, please get in touch and let us know by contacting [email protected].
The 2026 India AI Impact Summit
The global AI summit journey began in 2023 with the UK's Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, which focused on foundational discussions about AI governance and safety. This evolved into the 2024 Seoul AI Summit, structured around innovation, inclusion, and safety, followed by the 2025 France AI Action Summit with its expanded focus on international governance, future of work, and AI for the general interest.
Building on this momentum, India is hosting the 2026 AI Impact Summit with a distinctive focus on the impact of AI, particularly for global majority countries. This evolution reflects how the global AI dialogue has matured from initial safety concerns through actionable frameworks to now addressing the potential of AI for inclusive development across diverse economies.
India has structured the Summit around three foundational principles ('sutras') and seven key focus areas ('chakras'):
The Three Sutras:
People - Ensuring AI serves humanity's full diversity whilst respecting cultural identities and human dignity. This principle prioritises human-centred outcomes through fostering development in an AI-enabled world, advancing inclusivity via multilingual and culturally contextualised systems, and establishing frameworks for safe, trusted AI deployment.
Planet - Addressing environmentally sustainable AI development whilst leveraging AI to accelerate climate resilience and scientific breakthroughs. This recognises AI's expanding role in interpreting and influencing biological systems, ensuring technological advancement aligns with planetary stewardship.
Progress - Focusing on equitable distribution of AI benefits aligned with global development priorities. This bridges the digital divide by democratising access to datasets, computational infrastructure and advanced models, whilst applying AI to accelerate socio-economic development across healthcare, education, governance and agriculture.
The Seven Chakras:
Human Capital - Develops global frameworks for equitable AI literacy, workforce transitions, and ensuring productivity gains are shared broadly across society. Addresses the infrastructure gaps in developing economies for workforce transition and the fragmented approaches to AI literacy that risk exacerbating inequalities.
Inclusion - Fosters AI systems that are inclusive by design, locally relevant, and culturally respectful. Tackles the concentration of AI development among few actors and the exclusion of indigenous languages and diverse cultural perspectives, ensuring meaningful participation of traditionally excluded communities.
Safe and Trusted AI - Democratises access to governance tools, empowering all nations with technical capabilities for effective AI oversight whilst fostering innovation. Addresses the technological governance gap, particularly in the Global South, where current approaches remain fragmented with limited access to advanced governance tools.
Resilience - Promotes innovations enhancing energy efficiency throughout the AI lifecycle, ensuring all countries can equitably access AI-enabled solutions regardless of resource limitations. Recognises that AI systems require significant energy resources, challenging countries with infrastructure constraints.
Science - Expands responsible AI use in scientific innovation, promoting inclusive collaboration and strengthening research ecosystems to address shared challenges whilst emphasising open, interdisciplinary research. Aims to address the uneven access to AI tools and collaboration that currently disadvantages the Global South.
Democratising AI Resources - Establishes multilateral frameworks for equitable access to innovation essentials, transforming AI development from exclusive privilege into collaborative endeavour serving collective needs. Tackles the concentration of AI resources in specific centres that creates solutions with limited datasets failing to represent global realities.
Social Good - Enables identification and scaling of AI applications for public interest, creating frameworks for adapting successful approaches across geographies through knowledge sharing and cross-border collaboration. Addresses the limited and uneven application of AI in public sectors, particularly in the Global South.
The Summit's stated goal encapsulates this comprehensive vision: to chart a path towards a future where AI delivers transformative impact that serves humanity, advances inclusive growth, fosters social development, and promotes people-centric innovations that protect our planet.
Road to the Summit
The pre-summit process has been inclusive and busy. A public consultation was launched in June 2025, led by IndiaAI and MeitY via MyGov.in to gather citizen and stakeholder input on themes, agenda, and deliverables. This shaped the Summit's direction, followed by numerous official events hosted in India focusing on cybersecurity, responsible AI, and digital skills. International pre-summit events have also taken place in the USA and Switzerland.
A rolling application window opened in August 2025 for organisations to host events contributing to the Summit's objectives, with the event hosting period concluding on January 31, 2026. Applications were open to governments, research institutions, multilateral organisations, private sector organisations, non-profits, think tanks, civil society organisations, and industry or professional associations.
Flagship Events and Programming
The Summit features several flagship initiatives listed below which has been designed to showcase AI's transformative potential:
AI Impact Expo 2026 runs throughout the Summit (February 16-20), demonstrating AI's impact across sectors through domestic showcases and international programmes, with dedicated areas for startups and investors.
Research Symposium on AI and its Impact takes place on February 18, providing an interdisciplinary forum for researchers from India, the Global South, and the international community, chaired by Abhishek Singh, CEO of IndiaAI, and Prof. P. J. Narayanan from IIIT Hyderabad.
AI for ALL: Global Impact Challenge is a competition identifying solutions that use AI to enable large-scale impact, with the best solutions displayed at a summit showcase. Applications are open to students, working professionals, researchers, and startups.
AI by HER: Global Impact Challenge invites women technologists to demonstrate solutions addressing large-scale, real-world public challenges.
YUVAi: Global Youth Challenge engages the 13-21 age group through virtual bootcamps, with successful participants presenting their AI solutions at a grand showcase during the summit.
SCALE IndiaAI4Good 2026, an initiative by Yuva Unstoppable (an Indian NGO), provides a platform for AI-native startups to address India's most pressing social challenges through AI solutions.
February 16-18 feature flagship event finales, including the AI Impact Expo, competitions showcases, and the Research Symposium.
February 19 is designated for the leaders' plenary and CEO roundtables, bringing together heads of state, government officials, and business leaders for high-level discussions.
February 20 concludes the Summit with a Global Partnership on AI council meeting.
The Summit will be housed in the Bharat Mandapam, an expo centre that has previously hosted a G20 summit, providing world-class facilities for this landmark gathering.
The Summit has attracted prominent global leaders from technology, business, and civil society, including Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Bill Gates (Gates Foundation), Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries), and representatives from organisations including Zoom, Cisco, Royal Philips, Schneider Electric, and the World Economic Forum, among others.
What This Means for Global AI Development
The India AI Impact Summit comes at a moment in AI's evolution, as the first summit in this series to be hosted in a developing economy. This positioning ensures that conversations and focus will be anchored in AI opportunities and impacts for global majority countries, addressing the digital divide and ensuring that AI development serves diverse communities worldwide.
The Summit's emphasis on impact over purely technical considerations reflects a maturation of the global AI dialogue. By structuring discussions around People, Planet, and Progress, India is positioning AI as a tool for inclusive development rather than solely as a technological challenge to be managed.
The seven chakras provide a comprehensive framework that addresses key gaps in current AI development: from workforce transitions and cultural inclusion to governance tool access and resource democratisation. This holistic approach recognises that realising AI's potential requires addressing infrastructure, education, equity, and sustainability simultaneously.
The Summit is also being used to promote India's flagship Digital India initiative, which aims to provide government services electronically to citizens through improved online infrastructure and connectivity, as well as the INDIAai web portal launched in 2024 as a hub for AI-related developments in India.
As we approach the Summit, the focus on tangible impact and inclusive development promises to advance the global AI conversation in meaningful ways, ensuring that AI's transformative potential serves all of humanity rather than concentrating benefits among a few.
For more information or to get involved, please contact the team below:
Daniel Clarke
Senior Policy Manager for International Policy and Trade, techUK
Daniel Clarke
Senior Policy Manager for International Policy and Trade, techUK
Dan joined techUK as a Policy Manager for International Policy and Trade in March 2023.
Before techUK, Dan worked for data and consulting company GlobalData as an analyst of tech and geopolitics. He has also worked in public affairs, political polling, and has written freelance for the New Statesman and Investment Monitor.
Dan has a degree in MSc International Public Policy from University College London, and a BA Geography degree from the University of Sussex.
Outside of work, Dan is a big fan of football, cooking, going to see live music, and reading about international affairs.
Sabina Ciofu is International Policy and Strategy Lead at techUK, where she heads the International Policy and Trade Programme. Based in Brussels, she shapes global tech policy, digital trade, and regulatory cooperation across the EU, US, Canada, Asia-Pacific, and the Gulf region. She drives strategy, advocacy, and market opportunities for UK tech companies worldwide, ensuring their voice is heard in international policy debates.
With nearly a decade of previous experience as a Policy Advisor in the European Parliament, Sabina brings deep expertise in tech regulation, trade policy, and EU–US relations. Her work focuses on navigating and influencing the global digital economy to deliver real impact for members.
A passionate community-builder, Sabina co-founded Young Professionals in Digital Policy (800+ members) and now runs Old Professionals in Digital Policy (more experience, better wine, earlier nights). She is also the founder of the Gentlewomen’s Club, a network of 500+ women supporting each other with kindness.
She holds advisory roles with the UCL European Institute, Café Transatlantique (a network of women in transatlantic tech policy), and The Nine, Brussels’ first members-only club for women.
Recognised by ComputerWeekly as one of the most influential women in UK tech, Sabina is also a sought-after public speaker on tech, trade and diversity.
Sabina holds an MA in War Studies from King’s College London and a BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge.
Sue leads techUK's Technology and Innovation work.
This includes work programmes on cloud, data protection, data analytics, AI, digital ethics, Digital Identity and Internet of Things as well as emerging and transformative technologies and innovation policy.
In 2025, Sue was honoured with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the Technology Industry in the New Year Honours List.
She has been recognised as one of the most influential people in UK tech by Computer Weekly's UKtech50 Longlist and in 2021 was inducted into the Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK Tech Hall of Fame.
A key influencer in driving forward the data agenda in the UK, Sue was co-chair of the UK government's National Data Strategy Forum until July 2024. As well as being recognised in the UK's Big Data 100 and the Global Top 100 Data Visionaries for 2020 Sue has also been shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and was a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI. In addition to being a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security, Sue was recently a judge for the UK Tech 50 and is a regular judge of the annual UK Cloud Awards.
Prior to joining techUK in January 2015 Sue was responsible for Symantec's Government Relations in the UK and Ireland. She has spoken at events including the UK-China Internet Forum in Beijing, UN IGF and European RSA on issues ranging from data usage and privacy, cloud computing and online child safety. Before joining Symantec, Sue was senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Sue has an BA degree on History and American Studies from Leeds University and a Masters Degree on International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Birmingham. Sue is a keen sportswoman and in 2016 achieved a lifelong ambition to swim the English Channel.
Senior Programme Manager in Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK
Tess Buckley
Senior Programme Manager in Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK
Tess is a digital ethicist and musician. After completing a MA in AI and Philosophy, with a focus on ableism in biotechnologies, she worked as an AI Ethics Analyst with a dataset on corporate digital responsibility (paid for by investors that wanted to understand their portfolio risks). Tess then supported the development of a specialised model for sustainability disclosure requests. Currently, at techUK, her north star as programme manager in digital ethics and AI safety is demystifying, and operationalising ethics through assurance mechanisms and standards. Outside of Tess's work, her primary research interests are in AI music systems, AI fluency and tech by/for differently abled folks.
She holds over seven years of Government Affairs and Tech Policy experience in the US and UK. Kir previously headed up the regulatory portfolio at a UK advocacy group for tech startups and held various public affairs in US tech policy. All involved policy research and campaigns on competition, artificial intelligence, access to data, and pro-innovation regulation.
Kir has an MSc in International Public Policy from University College London and a BA in both Political Science (International Relations) and Economics from the University of California San Diego.
Outside of techUK, you are likely to find her attempting studies at art galleries, attempting an elusive headstand at yoga, mending and binding books, or chasing her dog Maya around South London's many parks.
techUK International Policy and Trade Programme activities
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Senior Policy Manager for International Policy and Trade, techUK
Daniel Clarke
Senior Policy Manager for International Policy and Trade, techUK
Dan joined techUK as a Policy Manager for International Policy and Trade in March 2023.
Before techUK, Dan worked for data and consulting company GlobalData as an analyst of tech and geopolitics. He has also worked in public affairs, political polling, and has written freelance for the New Statesman and Investment Monitor.
Dan has a degree in MSc International Public Policy from University College London, and a BA Geography degree from the University of Sussex.
Outside of work, Dan is a big fan of football, cooking, going to see live music, and reading about international affairs.
Sabina Ciofu is International Policy and Strategy Lead at techUK, where she heads the International Policy and Trade Programme. Based in Brussels, she shapes global tech policy, digital trade, and regulatory cooperation across the EU, US, Canada, Asia-Pacific, and the Gulf region. She drives strategy, advocacy, and market opportunities for UK tech companies worldwide, ensuring their voice is heard in international policy debates.
With nearly a decade of previous experience as a Policy Advisor in the European Parliament, Sabina brings deep expertise in tech regulation, trade policy, and EU–US relations. Her work focuses on navigating and influencing the global digital economy to deliver real impact for members.
A passionate community-builder, Sabina co-founded Young Professionals in Digital Policy (800+ members) and now runs Old Professionals in Digital Policy (more experience, better wine, earlier nights). She is also the founder of the Gentlewomen’s Club, a network of 500+ women supporting each other with kindness.
She holds advisory roles with the UCL European Institute, Café Transatlantique (a network of women in transatlantic tech policy), and The Nine, Brussels’ first members-only club for women.
Recognised by ComputerWeekly as one of the most influential women in UK tech, Sabina is also a sought-after public speaker on tech, trade and diversity.
Sabina holds an MA in War Studies from King’s College London and a BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge.
Theo joined techUK in 2024 as EU Policy Manager. Based in Brussels, he works on our EU policy and engagement.
Theo is an experienced policy adviser who has helped connect EU and non-EU decision makers.
Prior to techUK, Theo worked at the EU delegation to Australia, the Israeli trade mission to the EU, and the City of London Corporation’s Brussels office. In his role, Theo ensures that techUK members are well-informed about EU policy, its origins, and its implications, while also facilitating valuable input to Brussels-based decision-makers.
Theo holds and LLM in International and European law, and an MA in European Studies, both from the University of Amsterdam.
Lewis' programmes cover a range of policy areas within Market Access (international trade regulation, sanctions and export controls, technical standards and product compliance, supply chains) and Consumer Tech (media and broadcast policy, consumer electronics, and connected home technology).
Prior to joining techUK, Lewis worked in government affairs and policy roles for international trade associations in Southeast Asia including the American Malaysian Chamber of Commerce and the European Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia.
He holds an undergraduate degree in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Public Policy & Management from SOAS University of London.
Tess joined techUK as an Policy and Public Affairs Team Assistant in November of 2024. In this role, she supports areas such as administration, member communications and media content.
Before joining the Team, she gained experience working as an Intern in both campaign support for MPs and Councilors during the 2024 Local and General Election, and working for the Casimir Pulaski Foundation on defence and international secuirty. She has worked for multiple charities, on issues such as the climate crisis, educational inequality and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG). In 2023, Tess obtained her Bachelors of Arts in Politics and International Relations from the University of Nottingham.
Programme Manager, Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK
Tess is the Programme Manager for Digital Ethics and AI Safety at techUK.
Prior to techUK Tess worked as an AI Ethics Analyst, which revolved around the first dataset on Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), and then later the development of a large language model focused on answering ESG questions for Chief Sustainability Officers. Alongside other responsibilities, she distributed the dataset on CDR to investors who wanted to further understand the digital risks of their portfolio, she drew narratives and patterns from the data, and collaborate with leading institutes to support academics in AI ethics. She has authored articles for outlets such as ESG Investor, Montreal AI Ethics Institute, The FinTech Times, and Finance Digest. Covered topics like CDR, AI ethics, and tech governance, leveraging company insights to contribute valuable industry perspectives. Tess is Vice Chair of the YNG Technology Group at YPO, an AI Literacy Advisor at Humans for AI, a Trustworthy AI Researcher at Z-Inspection Trustworthy AI Labs and an Ambassador for AboutFace.
Tess holds a MA in Philosophy and AI from Northeastern University London, where she specialised in biotechnologies and ableism, following a BA from McGill University where she joint-majored in International Development and Philosophy, minoring in communications. Tess’s primary research interests include AI literacy, AI music systems, the impact of AI on disability rights and the portrayal of AI in media (narratives). In particular, Tess seeks to operationalise AI ethics and use philosophical principles to make emerging technologies explainable, and ethical.
Outside of work Tess enjoys kickboxing, ballet, crochet and jazz music.
On 11 September, techUK held a workshop from 9:30 to 12:30 with DSIT’s Responsible Technology Adoption Unit (RTA), featuring an address from Felicity Burch, Director of RTA and facilitation by Nuala Polo, AI Assurance Lead of RTA with attendance from techUK’s Digital Ethics working group members. This session allowed for testing and feedback on a forthcoming assurance tool set for public consultation in Autumn 2024.
