From Market to Architect

Uttam Prakash, Prof. Srinivas Josyula, Jay Verdhan Tiwari

The AI Impact Summit opened with serious policy deliberations. Yet one episode briefly entered public discourse: a robotic dog.
When an imported robot was presented as indigenous innovation, its clip circulated widely online. The episode did not define the summit. It did, however, sharpen a deeper question: how should AI readiness be assessed?
Away from the exhibition floor, institutions such as Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur have been developing indigenous quadruped robotic platforms through sustained research. The contrast is instructive. Demonstrations generate headlines. Institutions generate capability.
That distinction framed the summit’s deeper message. Artificial intelligence is no longer about who unveils the cleverest prototype. It is about who builds the most trusted ecosystem.
More than 100 countries gathered in India in 2026, extending a dialogue that began in the United Kingdom in 2023 and continued through South Korea and France. Earlier meetings centred largely on safety and risk mitigation. In New Delhi, the emphasis widened toward developmental impact.
The summit concluded with the New Delhi Declaration, endorsed by a broad coalition of nations and institutions, emphasising cooperation, inclusive growth and equitable access to AI capabilities. It underscored that technological progress must align with social empowerment and human-centred outcomes.
For emerging economies, that shift is material. The debate moved from containing risk to expanding opportunity.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has linked AI to India’s 2047 development vision. The credibility of that ambition rests on economic and institutional depth.
If the measure shifts from prototypes to ecosystems, the relevant question becomes structural: what foundations sustain AI capability?
The Economic Foundations
Artificial intelligence is built in layers.
Energy forms the base. Reliable electricity and renewable expansion determine compute capacity.
Infrastructure and hardware follow. Data centres, semiconductor access and GPU availability shape who can train and deploy advanced systems independently.
Here geopolitics becomes operational. Rare earth elements are essential for high-performance electronics. Brazil holds roughly 23 percent of global rare-earth reserves, second only to China. Engagement between Modi and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has placed critical minerals and technology cooperation on the bilateral agenda. Diversifying supply chains reduces concentration risk and strengthens India’s hardware backbone.
Domestic orchestration is equally important. The IndiaAI Mission enables access to more than 38,000 GPUs at approximately ?65 per hour, lowering entry barriers for startups and researchers. AI Kosh hosts over 7,500 datasets designed to improve diversity and mitigate bias, broadening participation rather than concentrating it.
Language capability is another structural pillar. Initiatives such as AI4Bharat and Bhashini are embedding Indian languages into foundational models, strengthening digital inclusion.
When energy, compute and data align with policy direction, ecosystems move from experimentation to scale.
Scale, however, is only the first milestone.
From Scale to Influence
Capacity alone does not translate into influence. Adoption does.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has noted that roughly 100 million Indians use ChatGPT every week. At that scale, India is central to the evolution of AI systems.
Capital markets have responded. Anthropic has opened a Bengaluru office. Blackstone is set to acquire a majority stake in Neysa, signalling investor confidence in India’s compute backbone.
Yet volume is only the starting point.
India is positioning itself to shape standards and deployment models. Open-source ecosystems allow researchers and startups to adapt systems to local realities without prohibitive licensing barriers. Domestic players such as Sarvam AI are building multilingual, cost-effective models suited to Indian and Global South contexts.
Diplomacy reinforces this transition. Engagements with European partners have expanded cooperation in semiconductors, quantum technologies and digital innovation, while discussions with Mauritius and Sri Lanka have centred on digital public infrastructure and AI for development. Trade, technology and development are increasingly aligned.
This is the difference between being a market and becoming an architect.
But architecture ultimately proves itself in application.
Where Systems Meet Society
Strategic positioning matters only if it produces capability on the ground.
In education, connected classrooms, including experiments with electronic learning boards supported by telecom platforms such as Reliance Jio, extend structured learning beyond metropolitan centres.
In healthcare, startups such as Niramai Health Analytix use thermal AI imaging to detect breast cancer early, reducing diagnostic delay.
Across rural India, organisations such as Karya enable individuals to undertake micro-tasks essential to training AI models. These distributed contributions form the ground truth on which intelligent systems rely.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. The opportunity before India is to build an ecosystem that strengthens education, sharpens agricultural advisories and modernises social security for the crores of gig and platform workers. An open, scalable and cost-conscious model carries relevance beyond national borders, particularly for the Global South.
The summit will ultimately be judged not by announcements or exhibitions, but by whether India converts infrastructure, mineral partnerships, capital flows and diplomatic alignment into durable public capability.
This time, India is not entering the AI era as a consumer economy. It is investing to become one of its architects.
(Uttam Prakash is Regional Provident Fund Commissioner (Kochi and Lakshadweep); Prof. Srinivas Josyula is a faculty at IIM Visakhapatnam and Jay Verdhan Tiwari is Scientist-E at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.)

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