Today, world leaders, AI founders, and technology executives are gathering in New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit 2026 — the largest global AI summit ever convened. Over five days, delegations from more than 100 countries will join 20 heads of government, 50 international ministers, and over 40 CEOs of global technology companies at Bharat Mandapam to shape the future of artificial intelligence.
The guest list reads like a directory of the people building the AI infrastructure the world runs on. Google's Sundar Pichai. OpenAI's Sam Altman. Anthropic's Dario Amodei. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis. Microsoft's Brad Smith. Qualcomm's Cristiano Amon. Accenture's Julie Sweet. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince. ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski. AI researchers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio. Indian industry leaders Mukesh Ambani, Nandan Nilekani, and Natarajan Chandrasekaran. Bill Gates. French President Emmanuel Macron. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will hold one-on-one meetings with 35 to 40 corporate leaders before delivering the main plenary address.
This isn't a technology conference. It's a geopolitical event — and what it signals matters more than what it announces.
From Safety to Impact: The Naming Tells the Story
Pay attention to the name. The global AI summit series has evolved through four iterations: Bletchley Park in 2023 focused on AI Safety. Seoul in 2024 continued with AI Safety. Paris in 2025 shifted to AI Action. And now New Delhi in 2026 centres on AI Impact.
That naming progression isn't accidental. It reflects a fundamental shift in the global AI conversation — from abstract governance debates to measurable deployment outcomes. The question is no longer "how do we make AI safe?" but "how do we make AI deliver results for people, economies, and institutions?"
This is the first global AI summit hosted in the Global South. That matters because it places practical deployment — not frontier research — at the centre of the agenda. The summit's three guiding themes are People, Planet, and Progress. Its working groups are organised around inclusive growth, public service delivery, healthcare, agriculture, education, and sustainable development. These aren't Silicon Valley talking points. They're deployment challenges — the same challenges enterprises face when moving AI from pilot to production.
For enterprise leaders, this shift validates what we've argued from the start: the organisations that win with AI are the ones that deploy it effectively, not the ones that build the most sophisticated models.
Why Every Major AI CEO Is in the Room
Bloomberg described the summit as "potentially the largest gathering of AI luminaries to date." The concentration of AI leadership in one room is worth examining — not for the spectacle, but for what it reveals about where the industry sees its next market.
Sam Altman set the tone before the summit began. Writing in The Times of India, Altman described the country as a potential "full-stack AI leader" and revealed that India has become OpenAI's second-largest user base globally, with 100 million weekly active users. India has the largest number of students using ChatGPT worldwide and ranks fourth globally in adoption of Prism, OpenAI's scientific research tool.
Altman outlined three conditions he believes must align for AI to deliver broad economic impact: Access — making tools available regardless of income or education. Adoption — integrating AI into schools, clinics, and small enterprises. Agency — building the confidence and literacy for people to use AI for decision-making, not just automation. When these three align, he wrote, people participate "not just as users of AI, but as builders and beneficiaries."
That framework — access, adoption, agency — applies to every enterprise deploying AI at scale. It's the same progression we see with our clients: first you need the technology available, then you need it integrated into workflows, then you need your teams confident enough to use it independently. The sequence matters as much as the technology itself.
Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centred AI ranks India third in global AI competitiveness, behind only the United States and China. The country's AI market is projected to surpass 17 billion dollars by 2027. OpenAI and Anthropic are both establishing operations in India, targeting Indian businesses and government clients directly.
When Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei are all in the same room — in the Global South — the signal is clear: AI deployment is no longer a Western enterprise conversation. The market has gone global.
What the Summit Structure Reveals About Enterprise AI in 2026
The summit will feature more than 500 sessions, 3,250 speakers, 300 exhibition pavilions, and 500 AI startups across a 70,000-square-metre expo. Nearly 100 billion dollars in prospective investments are expected to be discussed across the week.
But the structure tells you more than the numbers. The sessions are organised around seven thematic working groups — called "Chakras" — co-chaired by representatives from both the Global North and Global South. Each working group will deliver actionable proposals on shared compute resources, AI commons for public good, and real-world deployment frameworks.
This is governance designed for implementation, not theory. The deliverables are specific: shared compute infrastructure, standardised deployment frameworks, multilingual AI access, and cross-border data governance models. These are the same infrastructure questions that every enterprise deploying AI across multiple markets must answer.
The summit also prominently features the India AI Mission, a government initiative with an outlay of more than 10,000 crore rupees designed to expand compute capacity, support AI startups, and accelerate multilingual applications across healthcare, agriculture, and public services. The emphasis on multilingual capability — particularly for languages underserved by current AI models — addresses one of the most persistent barriers to enterprise AI adoption in non-English-speaking markets.
What This Means for the Gulf
The India AI Impact Summit carries specific implications for enterprises operating in the Gulf region.
The Global South is setting AI deployment standards. When 100 countries convene to define shared compute infrastructure, deployment frameworks, and governance models, the resulting standards will shape how AI is deployed across emerging markets — including the Gulf. Enterprises that understand these frameworks early will have an advantage in cross-border operations, regulatory compliance, and partner ecosystems.
India-Gulf AI corridors are strengthening. India's position as a global AI talent hub, combined with the Gulf's role as a capital and infrastructure hub, creates a natural corridor for enterprise AI deployment. Many Gulf enterprises already rely on Indian technology teams. As India's AI ecosystem matures — with both OpenAI and Anthropic now establishing local operations — the talent pipeline for AI implementation strengthens directly.
Multilingual AI is becoming a global priority. The summit's emphasis on multilingual capability — building AI that works in local languages, not just English — directly addresses one of the Gulf region's core requirements. Enterprises processing Arabic documents, serving Arabic-speaking customers, and operating across Arabic, English, Hindi, and other languages need multilingual AI that performs equally well across all of them. The global push for multilingual AI access will accelerate development of models and tools that serve these needs.
"Access, adoption, agency" applies everywhere. Altman's framework for AI deployment at national scale maps directly to enterprise deployment. Access — can your teams reach the AI tools they need? Adoption — are those tools integrated into the workflows where they create value? Agency — do your people have the confidence and skills to use AI independently, without constant support? Most enterprises we work with are strong on access but underinvested in adoption and agency. The summit's emphasis on all three dimensions reinforces that technology alone isn't enough — deployment is a human and operational challenge as much as a technical one.
Sovereign AI frameworks are expanding. India's approach to AI sovereignty — building domestic compute capacity, supporting homegrown models, and maintaining governance over data and infrastructure — parallels the trajectory we've seen across the Gulf. The frameworks emerging from this summit will inform sovereign AI strategies globally, providing models that Gulf nations can adapt for their own regulatory and infrastructure contexts.
The Pattern We Should All Be Watching
Step back and look at the trajectory of 2026 so far.
In the first two weeks of February, we saw the complete enterprise AI platform stack emerge — OpenAI Frontier, Anthropic Agent Teams, Cisco AgenticOps, and MCP standardisation. We saw five Chinese AI labs launch frontier models in a single week, validating model-agnostic architecture. We saw Goldman Sachs deploy AI agents for regulated financial operations. And now, today, we see 100 countries and every major AI CEO convening to define how AI gets deployed at global scale.
The pattern is unmistakable: AI has moved from technology to infrastructure to platform to policy. In the span of two weeks, the industry has progressed from "what can AI do?" to "how do we deploy it everywhere, for everyone, responsibly?"
For enterprise leaders, this means the deployment window is narrowing. The technology is production-ready. The platforms are available. The governance frameworks are being built. The global ecosystem — from Silicon Valley to Beijing to New Delhi to Dubai — is aligning around practical AI deployment at scale.
The organisations that treat this moment as an opportunity to accelerate their own deployment will compound their advantage with every framework, every standard, and every new model that emerges from this global alignment.
The organisations that wait will find themselves deploying AI into a world whose rules were written without them.
"The AI conversation just went global. Your deployment strategy should too."