India created what no one else did, Macron shared the story of Mumbai’s street vendor at AI Summit

New Delhi, 19 February. French President Emmanuel Macron told an interesting story at the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 on Thursday. He told everyone about the digital transformation of India by mentioning a street vendor of Mumbai. He told that the person who could not open a bank account a decade ago, now easily uses the online payment system. The French President began his address with ‘Namaste’ and thanked his host, saying, “Thank you very much for welcoming us to this wonderful city and this wonderful country. It is great to be back for this Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit hosted by you after your state visit in 2024.”

After this, Macron shared an anecdote to explain the progress made in India’s technology. He said, “I want to start with a story. Ten years ago, a street vendor in Mumbai could not open a bank account, no address, no papers, no access. Today, the same vendor takes payments from anyone in the country on their phones, instantly and for free. This is not just a tech story. This is a civilization story.” Emphasizing the scale of the digital infrastructure, Emmanuel Macron said, “India has created something that no other country in the world has created. A digital identity for 140 crore people. A payment system that now processes 20 billion transactions every month and a health infrastructure that has issued 500 million digital health IDs.”

Referring to last year’s joint initiative, he said, “Last year, when France and India co-hosted the AI Action Summit in Paris, we set out a global guiding principle for the technologies that will transform our societies and our economies. We say that Artificial Intelligence will help us innovate faster, driving change for the betterment of humanity in healthcare, energy, mobility, agriculture and public services. We both “We believe in this revolution, AI has become a big field of strategic competition and big technologies have become even bigger.”

“In the past year, AI has become a field of strategic competition, but a path forward focusing on innovation, self-reliance and strategic autonomy still remains. India has made sovereign choices by developing small, task-specific language models and deploying 38,000 government-funded GPUs at affordable rates to support startups,” he said. Finally, Macron said, “I started with the story of a street vendor in Mumbai. Ten years ago, the world told India that 1.4 billion people could not be brought into the digital economy. India proved them wrong. Today some people say that AI is a game that only big people can play.”

President Macron said, “India, France, Europe and our partners who believe in our approach can take a different approach, together with companies, governments and investors. The future of AI will be created by those who combine innovation and responsibility, and technology with humanity, and India and France together will help create this future.”