The world’s largest artificial intelligence summit opened to packed halls and long queues on Monday (February 16) as tech moguls, industry leaders, policymakers, founders, and technologists thronged the venue for the conference, where India is set to push for widening access to AI and seek international agreement on global AI commons.
The summit offers India not just a chance to showcase its vast tech-savvy population and engineering talent but also to push for democratising AI access in Global South. Besides wider access to AI, New Delhi may also seek international agreement on ‘global AI commons’ or a repository of use cases for AI in key sectors that can be shared.
From February 16 to 20, the summit will feature over 3,250 speakers and more than 500 sessions.
With huge billboards around the city welcoming delegates, speakers and guests at the AI Impact Summit, Bharat Mandapam saw long queues much before the conference opened at 09.30 hours, signalling the interest in the subject and the conference.
The enthusiasm was high despite the fact that the high-profile speakers – from Sundar Pichai of Alphabet to Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic – haven’t even arrived in the country. Their sessions start not before Wednesday.
Final two days big
Final two days of the Summit – February 19 and 20 – will see more than 20 heads of state and government, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, talking about the future of AI alongside business leaders and investors.
Panel discussions on the future of employability in the age of AI, skilling, safe and trusted AI at scale, AI governance and infrastructure, generative AI deployment, and public sector use cases drew standing-room-only audiences, with participants crowding corridors between sessions to network and exchange ideas.
An expo where the who’s who of the tech industry – from Google to Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft besides homegrown giants – put on display innovations on AI is held alongside. Focused on AI’s transformative impact, it includes 300+ exhibitions, 13 country pavilions, and addresses themes of People, Planet, and Progress.
The UK hosted the first AI Summit in 2023 that focused on AI safety and extreme risks. The next edition in France in 2025 saw trumpeting big investments in the tech sector.
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