BREAKINGVIEWS-India's summit captures AI hubris and angst

By Shritama Bose and Ujjaini Dutta

NEW DELHI, Feb 23 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The dissonance surrounding India's artificial intelligence dreams came alive at the AI Impact Summit. The five-day confab in New Delhi last week hosted global A-listers from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Alphabet's GOOGL.O Sundar Pichai and attracted investment pledges of over $250 billion, including from Reliance Industries RELI.NS and the Adani Group. But the euphoria barely concealed the country's simmering anxieties around the fast-moving technology.

The 500,000 visitors at the shindig focusing on "bridging the global AI divide" included delegates from 118 countries and swarms of college students attending sessions on everything from the creator economy to AI in agriculture and defence. On Saturday, 88 nations and international groupings endorsed the Delhi Declaration, which commits to democratising AI resources.

Yet even as crowds during the week cheered India’s homegrown government-backed answer to OpenAI and DeepSeek, Sarvam AI’s demonstrations of its "extremely frugal" large language models for Indic languages underscored the steep challenge facing most countries seeking to preserve AI sovereignty. Without powerful domestic alternatives, attendees warned, India risks becoming a digital colony of the United States and China.

Also lacking was substantial discussion on job losses from AI. India already struggles to create the 8 million roles it needs each year to absorb new entrants into the workforce. Its vast IT software services industry and role as the world's back office places it at the sharp end of disruption. V Anantha Nageswaran, India's chief economic advisor, at least hinted at the scale of the looming challenge, calling it "a stress test of our state capacity" - a remark that resonates in a country known for weak policy implementation.

The summit also failed to build consensus on who should shoulder the gargantuan task of reskilling a workforce whose future already fuels frequent primetime television debates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said reskilling must become a mass movement. In private, executives cast it as the government’s problem. Past precedent suggests India Inc will ultimately be forced to share the burden.

The lack of urgency perhaps stems from knowledge that multi-year contracts with global firms will buy outsourcers like Tata Consultancy Services TCS.NS, among India's largest employers, a few years to adapt. In time AI might create more jobs than it destroys, as Reliance's Chair Mukesh Ambani vowed to prove. But that's cold comfort for the swelling ranks of Indian workers caught up in the churn. For now, India has missed a chance to set the agenda for the Global South on this important topic. Hubris was poor cover.

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CONTEXT NEWS

The AI Impact Summit 2026 was held at New Delhi from February 16 to 20. The summit attracted 500,000 visitors, 20 heads of government and delegates from 118 countries, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said on February 20.