AI Impact Summit

BLOG 15/2026 DATED 26TH FEB 2026

AI Impact Summit 2026 concluded in New Delhi on 21^st Feb 2026 with 91 nations and international organisations signing the New Delhi Declaration. The high voltage saga continued for 6 days. It has been widely accepted that Artificial Intelligence is going to take the driver’s seat in the upcoming years, and it may prove another milestone after computers and internet.

As of now, there have been four major summits in the primary “International AI Summit” series:

Year	Location	Summit name	Focus
2023	Bletchley Park, UK	AI Safety Summit	Existential Risk & Safety
2024	Seoul, South Korea	AI Seoul Summit	Innovation & Governance
2025	Paris, France	AI Action Summit	Policy & Implementation
2026	New Delhi, India	AI Impact Summit	Inclusivity & Global South

In the year 2027 the summit is planned in Geneva, Switzerland. Apart from the international AI Summit series there are other efforts at various levels to bring in the synergy in implementation of Artificial Intelligence tools and its outcomes.

Other Major International AI Forums

• UN AI for Good Global Summit: Organized by the United Nations in Geneva every year since 2017. The summit focusses on using AI to meet Sustainable Development Goals.
• World Summit AI: Held annually in Amsterdam since 2017, with various regional editions (Montreal, Doha, etc.). This is an Industry leading summit.
• Global INDIAai Summit: India’s specific international forum, which has held multiple editions including a major one in 2024.

The “International AI Summit” series is generally considered the most significant governmental effort to coordinate global AI policy.

The discussion in the summit was focused on the Seven Pillars of Action (Chakras):

1. Democratizing AI Resources: Ensuring affordable access to robust digital infrastructure.
2. Economic Growth & Social Good: Wide scale use of AI for economic and social development.
3. Secure & Trusted AI: Establishing safety benchmarks and guidelines.
4. Science: Increasing availability of AI research infrastructure can promote the use of AI in scientific research and development across countries.
5. Access for Social Empowerment: AI holds the potential to uplift all sections of society by enabling individuals to access knowledge, cross-border AI solutions, information, services, opportunities and enhancing participation in social and economic activities
6. Human Capital: Specific initiatives on education, AI workforce development and training of public officials.
7. Resilience, innovation and efficiency: Focus on energy-efficient sustainable infrastructure.

Major Outcomes:

• Adoption of a multilateral declaration endorsed by a broad group of participating countries.
• It elevated the India’s standing in global AI governance debates.
• Earlier summits of the world had focused heavily on AI safety, the New Delhi gathering widened the lens to include development and inclusion.
• Reliance Industries announced its readiness to invest US$110 billion to build India’s sovereign AI infrastructure. The investment is planned over seven years.
• OpenAI and Tata Group will develop local, AI-ready data center capacity focused on data residency, security and long-term domestic capacity.
• Larsen & Toubro, announced a venture with Nvidia to build what it is billing as India’s largest AI factory.
• Google announced a $30 million AI for Government challenge and a separate $30 million AI for Science fund, alongside a new climate technology center in partnership with the Indian government
• Indigenously developed Sarvam model – the largest model trained from scratch in India. Being smaller in scale, in comparison with Gemini and ChatGPT, the model is projected to be more efficient and cost-effective.

Criticism:

• The framework is non-binding in nature, and the actual delivery of the outcome is yet to be seen.
• There was discussion on job loss, but no noteworthy solution came forward to handle such issue.
• India’s 5.80 million entry level IT workers may face the initial burnt. The solution for the sector was not attempted.
• The summit was also criticized for its tokenism and empty rhetoric rather than the real results.
• Finally, the Galgotias University fiasco resulted into mud sledging and disrepute to the entire summit and the image of the nation.

Conclusion:

Organising such international events certainly puts up the nation at a better stage in international and diplomatic field. AI is an upcoming technology that is surely going to dominate the future of technology, and such summits do assign value to the organising nations. The summit could have attempted to draw a plan for job replenishment as it is more important for India than any other country in the world due to India’s dependency on large frontline workforce in IT and non-IT sector.

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