India AI Impact Summit 2026: What Leaders Said On AI’s Promise, Power And Risks

News

1. Legacy IT Leaders Say India’s AI Future Lies in Talent, IP

2. PM Calls for Human-Centric AI at India Summit

3. Mistral’s Mensch Pitches Open-Source AI as Key to Digital Sovereignty

4. LeCun Questions Superintelligence Hype

5. Altman Sees Superintelligence Arriving in a Couple of Years

6. Inside the Debate Over AI’s Ownership Model

From sovereign compute and semiconductor ambitions to warnings on governance gaps and job disruption, the India AI Impact Summit 2026 this week in New Delhi turned into a wide ranging conversation on how artificial intelligence will reshape economies and societies. Here is what key leaders said:

Sam Altman, Chief Executive of OpenAI

Altman said,“We believe, we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence,” he said. “By the end of 2028, more of the world’s intellectual capacity could reside inside of data centers than outside of them.”

Though, he warned against concentration of power. “Democratization of AI is the only fair and safe path forward. Centralization of this technology in one company or country could lead to ruin.” He argued that resilience and shared responsibility are essential. “No AI lab, no AI system can deliver a good future on their own.”

For a democratic AI future, he added, “it is not enough to just give people tools and wealth. We also need to give them agency and power.”

Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic

Amodei described AI progress as exponential and said the world is nearing systems that surpass most humans at most tasks.

“We are increasingly close to what I call the country of geniuses in a data center,” he said, referring to highly capable AI agents coordinating at scale.

He also flagged risks around misuse and economic disruption. 

“AI will greatly grow the economic pie, including in India and the global south, but because it is happening so fast, it may lead to a time of disruption,” he said, calling for closer collaboration between governments and companies to manage the transition.

Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet

Pichai called AI “the biggest platform shift of our lifetimes,” and announced a full stack AI hub in Visakhapatnam as part of a $15 billion infrastructure investment in India.

He warned against unequal access. “We cannot allow the digital divide to become an AI divide,” he said, stressing investments in infrastructure, connectivity and skilling.

On responsibility, Pichai said trust is essential for adoption and governments have a “vital role” both as regulators and as innovators deploying AI in public services.

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Industries

No one articulated India’s ambition more forcefully than Ambani. “If wisely used, I believe AI can usher in an era of super abundance,” he said, describing it as a “modern-day Akshaya Patra” that offers “limitless augmentation in knowledge, efficiency, and productivity.”

Ambani predicted that “India will emerge as one of the greatest AI powers in the world in the 21st Century,” citing the country’s demography, democracy and digital infrastructure. “India cannot afford to rent intelligence,” he said. “We will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data.”

Through Jio Intelligence, Reliance plans to build sovereign compute capacity with gigawatt scale data centres, renewable energy integration and a nationwide edge compute layer. 

“From kirana stores to clinics, from classrooms to farms, intelligence will live at the edge,” he said. “Make intelligence as ubiquitous as connectivity. When compute becomes infrastructure, innovation will become inevitable.”

Ambani also stressed cooperation. “AI works its magic through sharing, not holding, through collaborations, not conflicts. Let us combine intelligence with empathy and let us build a better future for all.”

Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Group

“AI is the next big infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of intelligence,” Chandrasekaran said, comparing its impact to electricity and the internet.

The Tata group announced plans for a large-scale AI optimized data center starting at 100 megawatts and scaling to 1 gigawatt, in partnership with OpenAI. The group also partnered with AMD on AI architecture and said it is building an AI operating system for industries through Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

“It is the time for promise to take action into practice so that we can deliver prosperity,” he said, adding that Tata will work on domain-specific, AI-optimized chips, beginning with automotive applications.

Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind

Hassabis said artificial general intelligence may be “on the horizon, maybe within the next five years,” describing the coming phase as “one of the most momentous periods in human history, probably something more like the event of fire or electricity.” 

He said it could be “something like 10 times the impact of the industrial revolution happening at 10 times the speed.”

Yet he cautioned that progress must be grounded in science. “The main way we should try to do this is by taking a scientific approach, using the scientific methods to understand what the capabilities of these systems are, to build good guardrails and monitoring systems, and make sure that they serve the purposes that we want.”

Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI

Mensch pitched open-source artificial intelligence, digital sovereignty, and decentralized AI deployment, while casting India as a potential leader in the next phase of the AI economy.

“AI should be a tool for empowerment, not dominance,” he said, arguing that the real question is who controls AI systems, who benefits from them, and whether nations have a say in their deployment.

“Everyone that runs AI workloads should have access to the on and off button,” he said, pointing to concerns around overdependence on external providers.

“Open source is not a radical idea. It is what allowed us to build the cloud infrastructure and a secure internet,” he said.

“No language and no culture should be left behind,” he said, adding that local content aggregation will be key.

Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Chairperson, HCLTech

Malhotra framed AI as a strategic inflection point.

“The competitive edge in the AI era is not computing power; it is clarity of thinking,” she said, arguing that leadership and judgment will matter more than raw processing scale.

Using a cricket analogy, she compared AI to a T20 power hitter. “If you watched Ishan Kishan’s innings, 77 off 40 balls, you saw something that is a perfect analogy for AI in T20 cricket. When a power hitter walks in and starts clearing the boundary from ball one, the captain doesn’t take her fielders off the field. He resets the field deeper.”

“AI is the power hitter,” she said. “But the game is not batsman versus nobody. AI is a team sport.”

For India, she said the transition must move from scale-led growth to intellectual property-led value creation. “IP compounds; it strengthens competitiveness, anchors strategic autonomy, and ensures long-term economic resilience.”

She called for democratized national AI infrastructure and accessible compute. “Compute must be treated as digital public infrastructure. When compute is accessible, innovation decentralizes.”

On governance, she was unequivocal. “The true test of AI is not how fast it scales, but whom it serves. Responsible AI is not a feature. It is a foundation.”

Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer, Meta

Wang outlined Meta’s long-term vision of “personal superintelligence.”

“It won’t just do your admin, it’ll be an extension of you so you can be you more,” he said, describing AI systems that help individuals manage health, projects and daily life.

Addressing concerns around misuse, he said adoption depends on responsible deployment. “People aren’t going to hire us for the job if we’re not doing it responsibly,” he said, pointing to transparency and model evaluations.

Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture

Sweet echoed the growth imperative. “Using AI as an engine for growth is the only path for global prosperity for all,” she said, adding that companies and countries must reinvent how they work and learn. “It is humans in the lead, not humans in the loop, that will determine our future.”

Sweet said advanced AI must unlock new products and performance levels. “If in a few years as a CEO you cannot point to new products and services, new levels of performance that were not possible before, then you have not captured the potential of AI.” 

Ultimately, “technology, no matter how powerful, is only a tool. It is the leaders who decide how to use those tools.”

Roy Jakobs, CEO, Philips

Jakobs argued that healthcare will see AI’s most tangible impact. 

“Healthcare runs on trust,” he said, emphasizing on transparency and continuous validation.

He described AI-enabled imaging, predictive monitoring and autonomous MRI workflows that can reduce backlogs and detect deterioration earlier.

“It will not be remembered for what is optimized on the screen, but for the billions of lives that we could improve with it,” he said.

Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures

Khosla focused on direct public impact, particularly for lower income populations.

“Unless AI benefits the bottom half of the Indian population, we’re not going to see a huge amount of impact,” he said.

He proposed AI-based personal tutors, primary care doctors and agronomy advisors delivered at scale, potentially integrated with India’s Aadhaar system.

“The future is here today,” he said, arguing that services once thought to require massive capital could now be delivered at low cost using AI.

Nikesh Arora, CEO, Palo Alto Networks

Arora offered a cautionary perspective, saying AI is moving faster than institutions can adapt.

“AI is accelerating faster than our institutions, our governance frameworks, and even our intuition,” he said, warning that the balance is currently tilted toward speed rather than trust.

He identified three challenges: governance and accountability for autonomous agents; human impact including job displacement; and cybersecurity risks from data exposure and adversarial systems.

“We have to solve the problem of governance and accountability, we have to solve the problem of social and human impact, and we have to solve the problem of cyber security,” he said.

Rishad Premji, Executive Chairman of Wipro

Premji said AI represents a generational shift. “Once a generation of technology emerges, that doesn’t just change what we can do. It truly changes what we must do. AI for me is certainly that technology.”

He noted that industry has moved beyond experimentation. “The conversation has fundamentally shifted from possibility to practicality. From experimentation to adoption and from pilots to scale impact.” 

Technology, he said, “creates value only when it is applied to solve real world problems, responsibly and at scale.” The dividing line ahead “will not be human versus machine. It will truly be between those who adapt and those who hesitate to adapt.”

Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft

For Brad the defining issue is equity. 

“AI, perhaps more than any other technology this century, will play a bigger role either in closing this economic divide or in exacerbating it and making it even wider,” he said. “How can we do better? Because we need to do better.”

Smith argued that infrastructure is central. “We need to bring infrastructure to the Global South. That means data centers and compute. It also means more connectivity. It means more electricity.” 

He said Microsoft is on pace to spend $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand AI infrastructure in the Global South.

“Infrastructure is not only hardware,” he added. “It’s skilling for people.” Human capability, he said, “is neither fixed nor finite,” but depends on how technology is deployed.