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IT, the technology. Ladies and gentlemen, and now I have the privilege of inviting our last speaker for the day, Mr. Amit Zaveri, President and Chief Product Officer, ServiceNow. Mr. Zaveri has spent his career at the intersection of enterprise software and AI, most recently leading ServiceNow’s push to embed AI agents into every corner of enterprise workflow. His perspective on agentic AI what it actually delivers versus what it promises is grounded in millions of enterprise deployments. He’ll be in conversation with Arjun Karpal, CNBC’s Senior Tech Correspondent. Please welcome our guest and the moderator.

All right. Hello, everyone. Hi, thanks so much for joining us. And if you’re watching online, thank you so much. Amit, let’s just kick off. You’ve got this view that trust is the new infrastructure in this age of AI. Can you just unpack what that means?

Yeah. Thank you, Arjun. I think if you look at what’s going on in the AI space, there’s a huge amount of interest in terms of using it in enterprise use cases as well, right? And without understanding what it’ll do for you and having any idea of what it landed up implementing inside your system, it becomes very hard to really depend on it. So that’s why without trust and safety and understanding of what’s happening in your underlying environment, it becomes very hard to expect to use AI in a lot of these enterprise use cases because your companies will not be able to do any auditing, compliance, visibility, and you wouldn’t really be able to really not run business without any kind of understanding of what’s going on.

So trust has to be a big part of it.

And trust, I guess, in the enterprise sense of the word probably has lots of different definitions, right? We’re talking about trust amongst employees, for example, but also from the cyber perspective, from the security and safety perspective you were just mentioning there. So it’s worth digging into some of these. How do you design some of these? In the enterprise, let’s start with perhaps the human element. at this point, because there’s a lot of concern from people right now about potential job losses and the impact AI could have on their roles as well. So from the human perspective, how do you design trust within the organization?

Yeah, no, I think it’s still something which I think the industry is still trying to figure out, to be honest. The way to think through this one is, one, everybody has to accept that AI is useful, and there’s a lot of opportunity to embed that in terms of your day -to -day lives. Second, I think there is a reality that this thing is transforming how the world works, and it’s moving very fast. So once you understand the principles and the value of it, then you start building together in terms of what the cultural shifts need to be, how people need to work together, and how do you help them understand the value while keeping their jobs very important and be able to bring them into the conversation.

So there’s a huge amount of cultural shift inside the company, as well as being able to kind of educate. Everybody in terms of what it delivers for you. So what we’ve been doing at ServiceNow, for example, we’ve been retraining our employees and giving them access to a lot of the AI capabilities, making sure they get to see what it does for their day -to -day life at the employee productive level and see that, okay, you know what, I could do my job faster, better, more efficiently, and free up more of my time to do other things which I couldn’t get to. Second thing after that, once you get them re -skilled, is to really now take it to the enterprise level, not just an employee.

Like, now how do you improve your processes? And the processes which are cutting across multiple departments, can I make that thing work faster? Can I get a better understanding of how it operates? And can you land up freeing up a lot of the human painful work you used to do, right? A lot of the repetitive tasks, which we used to call a skull -crushing task, which is making it so difficult in the day -to -day life that they can’t really get anything done beyond that. So if you remove those barriers, people start trusting that, oh, you know what, this is helping me. It’s getting my job done better. And it’s also getting me more understanding of new technologies.

So, I’m going to go ahead and start talking about the technology that I’m using. And you start accepting that in your day -to -day work environment and take that to the next level because you start innovating. So it’s a step process, I would say. And what we have done today at ServiceNow, we’ve seen the adoption go up a lot, be it in engineering, be it in finance, be it in customer support, be it in go -to -market, because they started playing with these technologies and bringing it to the day -to -day work environment. And from there, they’ve been starting to now innovate and come up with new ideas to help make their jobs better and how you make the customer’s life better long -term.

Does that set them up then for success when, you know, inevitably we will see the changing nature of work? And also, we’ve already seen some companies, you know, make layoffs and blame it on AI, whether that’s true or not is another debate. But certainly, there will be changing nature of work and organizations are rethinking the workforce. So by doing the reskilling, is this… Setting employees up.

No, I think you’re right. I mean, with any technology transformation, there’s always worries about job losses. It’s nothing, this is not the first time a technology shift has created that anxiety. It has happened with the cloud when the cloud happened. It happened with the web when the transformation happened towards that. I think the difference here is the speed sometimes and the uncertainty of understanding what it does to you as an individual in some cases. But I think the worry, a lot of the news out there is saying because of AI, we reduce our staffing. I think some of them are just using that as an excuse I’ve seen so far. If you look at our business, our AI business has grown significantly.

And we have been able to add more people because we were able to expand our tap. We’ve been able to get into a lot more new segments of market because of the investment. We’ve been able to reinvest a lot of that money we save because of AI into a lot of new areas. And that is one thing which I think a lot of companies are starting to realize. You take out a lot of the mundane tasks and move into the high value tasks. You can increase your top. line. Sure, you help on the bottom line with AI. There is a lot of work you can now outsource to autonomous agents and agentic workflows instead of having to do it by humans.

But the humans are now able to do a lot of other things you couldn’t and get into a lot of new segments. Now, business has grown significantly because we’ve been able to now take that savings and invest into a lot of new areas.

You mentioned agentic there, and I’m glad you did because the other part of this trust equation is what you were mentioning earlier around safety and security as well. Well, given the excitement around agentic AI and how much businesses want to adopt this, is there enough focus being put right now on the vulnerabilities from a cyber perspective when it comes to agentic AI?

I would say that’s probably the biggest concern for companies when they think about AI and agentic, right? If you look at last year, early last year, when we used to go and talk about agentic workflows or AI, most of the companies were worried about not having any kind of visibility, worried about vulnerabilities, worried about security, worried about control. And once we started introducing them the capability of controlling some of this implementation and having security profiles around the AI implementation, a lot more companies started adopting AI. Late last year, I would say middle of last year and late last year, the volume of our agentic workflows being adopted by customers went up by 55 times, 55x. Because what happened was they started feeling comfortable that one, they have visibility into all the AI systems.

Second, they have ability to secure it because you don’t want to lose access to your data or get it accessed externally without any kind of permissions. And once you start giving them that comfort factor, they’re starting to see the benefit of taking agentic AI and implementing that into the businesses, be a workflow around case management, incident management, triaging, be able to resolve issues. And that is a very, very valuable things for them. But once you only can do that once you have the security part of it. So, for example, we’ve been. Investing aggressively in the security space, our security. business itself is a billion dollars plus, but we’ve been adding now for AI agents. The AI agents are changing roles every second you call them based on what requirements you have.

So how do you manage the permissions? How do you manage their identity? So we bought recently a company called Vesa, which does access graphs for non -human identities, which makes it much more valuable to our customers because now they know that those agents are guaranteed to not do something nefarious or they won’t have access to data you’re not allowed to have. And whenever you change the roles, they’re only getting to do things based on the roles. So it’s a very important part of it. And I think agentic AI and things like that will not be adopted if you don’t have a right kind of security technology as part of this implementation. It cannot be on the side.

It has to be part of the product.

There’s certain tech companies who will sort of talk up the capabilities of agentic AI right now and talk up how enterprises are adopting AI. But what do you think? I think it’s a very important part of it. I think it’s a very important part of it. From your perspective, has the adoption of AI from enterprises been faster, slower, or about right than you had anticipated?

I think there was a lot of expectation early last year. Everybody thought that agentic AI and AI agents will be proliferated across every enterprise. I thought that was probably a little more optimistic and unrealistic because there were a lot of technologies which are missing to really provide you a platform which guarantees everything before you go and adopt it. A lot of those things started happening, I think I would say middle last year, and now the volume of adoption has gone up. But it is probably more thoughtful than probably experimental the way it was before. A lot of people were experimenting with it, but they were not wanting to put it in production because of the security things you talked about, trust and safety and compliance.

Now with a lot of the things customers are seeing from vendors like us, where you’re providing AI control tower, for example, to make sure you have visibility and control, they’re feeling more comfortable. So the volume is starting to go up. Use cases are getting much more defined. And what I’ve seen so far is that once you implement one or two use cases, you start seeing ROI. then the next more use cases become very very fast so you have to make it easy to be adopted you have to provide the security and everything else around it and then get them to see the roi and once you get the roi i think the customers all feel that this is something valuable to them and it’s something they want to invest in

i mean can i get your take on a on a comment we had on cnbc this week i was speaking to the ceo of mistral ai in europe and it was around this conversation happening in financial markets right now around software yeah um and how much are these agentic ai systems going to do the job of software that enterprises currently pay for uh and these sas businesses and he said you know he believes that 50 roughly of current you know software being used by enterprises uh could shift to ai i just wanted to get your take on that given how how embedded you are in this industry

no i think that there’s there’s a lot of people who are in the industry who are in the industry who are in the industry a lot of this debate about what is ai going to do the software industry i think uh ai is going to be a synergetic part of Any software you’re going to build going forward, and it’s already happening now, has to be with AI mindset and AI as part of the platform and the foundation. The companies which are going to suffer are the companies who are not adopting AI fast enough. So any vendor who’s thinking about AI as a side thing or something which is coming later, I think it’ll be very difficult to really justify customers buying that product.

Companies like us and others who are starting to make, we have been doing that for a few years, where they’ve been making AI part of the foundation, part of the platform. We’re already accelerating that adoption because customers, once they value, second, I think they do believe that this is going to be a very competitive advantage to them as well. And so we see a lot of synergy. We do a lot of partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic. We work with Mistral. We work with Google and Gemini because I think there’s a synergy between what foundational models and AI technology provides. and all the things you have to do around it. That’s what software industry can do. So what we’re doing is we’re building on top of it, but it’s like 5 % to 10 % of IP comes from those models.

90 % comes from technology we build because you have to build a lot of context around enterprise use cases. You have to understand what it means. You have to understand why an exception happened, how you handle it. Models are basically telling them what to do, but they don’t know why. The why part, the context part, comes from technologies and software we build. And the companies who are going to do that much more

better, understand domain, understand expertise, and have a lot of experience, will win in this market. And that’s the difference, I think. I mean, we’ve got about a minute left. I just wanted to get your take on the future. If we were sat here

I think we still will be talking about security and risk, definitely, because there’s a lot of work still to be done. regulations. Every country is now thinking about what AI means to them, what kind of regulations they want to put in for privacy, security, other things like that. I think the other one which is starting to come up a lot is physical AI. So we’re doing a lot of work in OT, operational technology, because a lot of the shop factories are changing with physical AI, with humanoids and droids and things like that, because they are going to be the next generational way of manufacturing. So how do you now secure that? How do you bring that as part of the processes?

How you integrate that into your environment is going to be a critical discussion as well.

Fantastic. Amit, thanks for your insights. So incisive. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Round of applause for Amit Zaveri of ServiceCamp. Thank you, everyone.

Mr. Amit Zaveri, and thanks, Arjun Karpal, for moderating this conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, with this, we end.

Thank you so much, Mr. Sikha, for your profound and very interesting remarks. And of course, your work at VNI also exemplifies the transformative potential of artificial intelligence. And with this movement on the stage, you can make out that now we are heading into a fireside conversation. And well, this would be a remarkable conversation we’re going to have with Mr. Nandan Nilakani, co -founder and chairman in FOSIS and Dario Amode, founder of Anthropic. And before I invite our guests on the stage, let me say a few words about Mr. Nandan Nilakani, who is the architect of Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity system and the intellectual godfather of India’s digital public. Infrastructure movement. Nandan Nilakani has spent decades proving that technology built in the public interest can transform entire societies.

And Aadhaar is a big example before the world. His thinking on artificial intelligence and open digital ecosystems is essential reading for anyone serious about this field. So, ladies and gentlemen, I would now invite Mr. Nandan Nilekani and Mr. Dario Amode for this conversation, which is being moderated by Mr. Rahul Mathan, partner Tri Legal. I invite all our three guests on the stage. Please welcome our guests on the stage. Thank you.

Nandan, Dario, welcome. Dario, great speech in the morning. You mentioned the… that we are in the end of the, or towards the end of the exponential. This is something that you spoke about in Machines of Loving Grace, that we would have a country of geniuses in a data center. And the models over the last, I guess, two months have been sort of giving us a sense that we’re getting there. But in your podcast with Dwarkesh, you sort of walk that back a bit by saying, you know, we may reach a country of geniuses in a data center, but the impact on society will take a long time. Can you explain what that means? Because we thought we’d do AGI and we would be finished and done with it.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having us, Rahul. You know, I would say there is this duality between the fundamental capabilities of the technology and the time that it takes for those capabilities to, you know, to diffuse into the world, right? We’re getting models that are very good at software engineering, that are increasingly good at, you know, biomedical innovation. We’re not there yet, but we’re on this very fast exponential. But when I look across the world and, you know, I look across the enterprises of the world, we have many enterprises as customers. Even if we freezed in place what the technology was capable of today. I think the economic impact could be much greater than it is because, you know, it just takes time.

There are just frictions to adopt things through enterprises. And, you know, I think even more so in the developing world. And, you know, when I, you know, visited Infosys, one of the things I talked about with Nandan was, you know, that we’re both obviously very interested in, you know, making sure that this technology gets to everyone. And Nandan has, you know, has devoted a big part of his life to, you know, many things, you know, many things in that direction and has, you know, built out India’s digital public infrastructure. And so, you know, I think this question of diffusion is very tied to the question of how do we make sure that everyone benefits. So.

When the foundation models came, Nandan, you said that we should do use cases. And it sounds like Dario is saying the same thing, that even if we do the foundation model, we will still need to do use cases.

No, I think it’s great what the foundations models are doing and the speed of evolution. But what we have learned is that diffusion of technology is a different ballgame. And how do you get technology to a billion people? And I think India, we have a little bit of experience with that, 1 .4 billion people on Aadhaar, 500 billion people on UPI, 20 billion transactions a month, the world’s largest cash transfer system, the largest financial inclusion system, you name it, all that stuff. And we learned that diffusion is a technique. It’s both an art and a science. It involves institutions. It involves policymaking, negotiations, dealing with incumbents, dealing with newcomers, strategies for execution. So the whole, you know, trust building, so a whole host of things.

And I think if all the investments in AI are going to deliver the value to society, not just to individuals, we’ll have to look at diffusion pathways to take this to everyone. And I think India will lead on that. That’s why I’ve always been saying that India should. Focus on becoming the use case capital of the world.

Talia, you had a more recent essay, which you call The Adolescence of Technology, which is a little more somber, spoke a little bit about sort of dimming the enthusiasm of the first essay. And I want you to perhaps unpack that a little bit. You know, we all have spoken about the risks of the technology, but particularly in the global south, where we think that AI is going to be hugely beneficial for us. Perhaps we’ll have a different calculus on the risk -reward ratio. What do you think about that, and how would your essay address that?

You know, I think that’s an insightful comment, which is that, you know, I think in the global south, there’s an opportunity for AI to accelerate catch -up growth, to solve a bunch of problems that are in the way of catch -up growth. And so, you know, I think AI is a technology that has, you know, big risks and big benefits. But in the global south, the benefits… The benefits may be even bigger than… than they are anywhere else. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean, of course, that the risks aren’t real. You know, we kind of – India is the world’s largest democracy. You know, we need to think about how democracies handle AI and, you know, how we confront other countries that are authoritarian.

You know, that’s one of the risks I talk about. Another risk I talk about is making sure that AI systems are safe and predictable and, you know, autonomously behave in a way that’s under our control. And, you know, everyone in the world has to worry about that. That affects everyone in the world. And then, you know, I think of particular relevance to India is, you know, the concerns I raised around economic displacement, right, where, you know, I think the signature of this technology is going to be that it greatly grows the economic pie for the whole world. And, again, you know, huge upside because the opportunity for catch -up growth, like, you know, growth can be very, very fast.

but, you know, there’s, there, things are going to change and there’s some potential for disruption. And, you know, I think what I’ve been thinking about as I visited India these last few days, and the last time I visited is, you know, how can we work together with the companies in, in, in India to kind of drive this growth for everyone, to make sure that the existing companies, large and small, continue to prosper along with us and the other makers of, of, of, of, of AI. And, and, you know, also on a philanthropic basis, how we, how we make sure that the benefits reach everyone, both in an economic sense, in a health sense, in kind of other senses.

So, you know, I think, I think, I think India, you know, it kind of offers a particularly keen distillation of, of, you know, especially the benefits, but, but also the risks.

Nandan, you’ve had experience with an adolescent technology with you, with the whole DPI. In the early days of DPI, it was challenging. There were challenges with getting, you know, the big vision, which of course, now we’re looking at, and in hindsight, it looks like it was easy, but the early days was difficult. So as the father of a, of a mature technology, would you want to give the father of a, an adolescent some advice?

I don’t know, that makes me a grandfather. So I think when you talk about diffusion, and you have to think of AI, everybody agrees it’s like a general purpose technology, like people give the simile to fire or electricity or whatever. It’s about starting from the user and how can we improve their lives? How can we take a billion people and help them to learn better? How can we take a billion people and give them better healthcare? How can we take a half a billion farmers and improve their earnings? You have to start from there and then figure out how to make it happen. And it’s not just technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle.

It’s about institutions. It’s about trust building. It’s about negotiations. It’s about guardrails, which Dario mentioned. It’s about working with different stakeholders and making them go towards a common vision. So it’s diffusion. Diffusion is difficult. It’s not a simple task. So I think, I feel that India will demonstrate this because we have the experience. of diffusion at population scale in all the various areas. And obviously, diffusion of AI, there are some differences that we need to think about, data, guardrails, and so on. But I think we can build a pathway or multiple pathways to that goal. And that will show the world. Because I believe right now in AI, there’s a race to the top and a race to the bottom.

And the race to the bottom is faster than the race to the top. So I think all of us who have a stake in AI being useful to humanity have to accelerate and redouble our efforts to make the diffusion happen. Otherwise, the consequences are going to be very, very difficult. Because there’s going to be a backlash. If the only thing that AI does is create deep fakes or raise the price of your power bill, or all the other things that are happening, people are going to respond. I mean, the resentment of the blue -collar worker led to the train wreck of globalization. The resentment of the white -collar worker is going to lead to the train wreck of AI.

So I think we really have to work very hard to show profound, useful cases of AI.

Taddeo, you were in India in October, and you’re back again now. You spend a lot of time, actually, with the developer community. You clearly were impressed because you’ve come back so quickly. Could you tell us a little bit about what your experience is with how India is building and using AI? Perhaps just go through the stack. I mean, enterprise, small business, startups, then developers. What’s different about the way India does it?

Yeah, so I would say there’s just an excitement here and a technical acumen. And we can even see it in the statistics of usage of Claude. You know, use of Claude for technical kind of programming and software engineering, mathematical tasks, the fraction is substantially higher here in India than it is in most other places in the world. And, you know, every time I go to speak at one of these, you know, kind of, you know, we’ll host these builder or developer events in India, just there’s a lot of excitement. You know, I can feel the brimming excitement of like, you know, what is something that we can build. In just the last four months, you know, the use of Claude and Claude code has doubled in India.

And, you know, I’m sure it’s the same for the other. I don’t say that to promote Claude and Claude code. Like, it’s more a statement about the kind of excitement. I mean, excitement in India on the enterprise level. I mean, you know, the two of us just announced a partnership just yesterday. So, you know, we’re really excited to work with. all the, you know, all the large enterprises in India. They know much more about the Indian market. They know much more about, you know, distribution. They know how to serve enterprises within India. And, you know, they’re much better at that than we are. And, you know, can we plug our technology into what they do and, you know, create something that kind of, you know, that kind of wins for both sides, right?

We would like to be able to, you know, jointly win with the companies in India. And then finally, I think there’s another element that’s almost unique, which is that there’s an excitement to build, but there’s an excitement to build for public good and for philanthropic benefits. So, you know, Nandan kindly introduced me to the XTAP Foundation, of course, builds digital infrastructure. And we’ve already started to work on a number of projects really to reach people in rural areas. We’re trying to combine Quad with something called Open Agri. Which, you know, helps farmers in rural regions to kind of find better information and, you know, better advice to be more effective and efficient. And we’re looking to expand that a great deal.

So I think that’s something, you know, that’s something totally unique to India and that, you know, through folks in the private sector, we would get connected to these efforts. And, you know, there would be mutual enthusiasm to promote these efforts.

And you, of course, have an office. You’ve declared a managing director. But actually, more importantly, Sonnet 4 .6, which dropped yesterday very inconveniently, so I couldn’t try it, apparently is doing very well on 10 Indic languages. So there seems to be a bit of a focus in your development as well on India. Can you tell me why that’s important, why language, cultural context is important, and what, you know, India can play, what role it can play in that?

Yeah. So, you know, language models have always… They’ve always been multilingual. But, of course, they’re better at languages than they’re… That, you know, that they’ve been… trained moron. And, you know, of course, you know, as I learned when I first came here, India has, you know, a very long tail of regional languages. And, you know, we see this as something related to access, something related to making sure we provide benefits for everyone, right? If you can only speak the most common languages, then there’s a long tail we’re not reaching, right? The farmers that we mentioned, you know, many of them speak one of the less common regional languages. And so we’ve put in place a push, you know, collaborating with folks in India to acquire more data for this long tail of Indic languages.

And Sonnet 4 .6 represents an improvement. We’re, you know, we’re not all the way there yet. We want these models to, you know, to be, you know, to be, you know, as good, even far out in the long tail of these languages as they are at, you know, speaking English. And we’re making progress towards that. We’re not there yet, but we want to keep going.

And then after you built DPI. I mean, I say after, like, as if you’ve stopped, you still continue to do it. But after you did the bulk of the work, you spend some time and effort actually taking it out to other countries. And I was wondering whether you’ve thought about that for AI. And, you know, as we, you know, it’s been mentioned so many times today that this is the first AI summit in the global south. And so I think perhaps countries of the global south, if there’s a model, as it were, for doing this would benefit from those ideas. So as you think about it, is it costs? Is it skill? Is it data?

Infrastructure? What is it that, you know, countries need to think about for

this? No, sure. You know, finally, it’s about a lived experience. If you’ve done it, you can do it better next time. So what we did in the DPI part, the digital public infrastructure, is that after several years of that experience, we worked with global philanthropists, set up something called Crop. And we did a lot of work on that. And we did a lot of work on that. And we did a lot of work on that. And we did a lot of work on that. And we did a lot of work on that. And we did a lot and said, let’s take DPI global. And today we have some version of DPI running in about 40 countries around the world.

We recently had a summit in Cape Town where we had 1 ,200 delegates from 109 countries. So it’s become a global moment. And we feel that AI has to be, if AI has to really be impactful, we need something similar. So yesterday we just launched something

Can you explain that?

Yeah, so the idea is that a diffusion pathway is basically a way to reach a particular goal, which you got from learning, from doing things, and then packaging it. And it’s not just technical packaging. It’s about guardrails. It’s about how do you get institutions on board? How do you make data available? There’s a whole host of things. But think of it as a toolbox or a playbook for doing things. And then this is a global initiative. So we’re going to work around the world and create multiple diffusion pathways and then share them. We’re going to switch each other so that we can accelerate this thing. And, you know, Anthropic is part of that. We have Google as part of that.

Gates Foundation is there. UNDP is there. The Kenyans. It’s a global coalition. Because what we learned from the agriculture experience, you know, we implemented, we worked with Maharashtra on their agri -stack, which is called Mahavistar. And that took us nine months to figure out how to make it work safely at scale. Using the same learning, it was done in Ethiopia. Which took three months because we had the learning of Maharashtra. And then using the same learning, the PM was very keen to see it in animal husbandry. So we worked with Amul. And we did that in three weeks. So you can see the trajectory of time, right? From nine months to three months to three weeks.

So what that shows is that if we can do this lived experience and keep improving and package that and take it to the world, we’ll move the implementation of AI to the next level. to the real world. And that I think is strategically important for the world of AI.

So 100 by 30 is the new…

Yeah, 100 diffusion pathways by 2030. And we welcome everyone to join this moment.

You have many such catchphrases, but the one that really stood out to me some time ago was India needs AI and AI needs India. We’ve spoken a bit about the India needs AI, but why does AI need India?

Yeah, because this is where we’re going to show it working. You know, I mean, I think because of the history of India’s digital journey and thanks to the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, who is the biggest champion of all the work that’s going on, we have a political leadership that’s committed. We have technologists. We have enough people with the right value system to make this happen. And we have done this before. And therefore… India will be where you’ll see most of the deployment of AI in a tangible way, where farmers are able to make more money, where children learn better, where healthcare is better, where people talk in their own language, so you have universal access.

So this is where you’re going to show this. And the world needs this to be shown and the AI companies need this to be shown because they have to show real stuff where this is working at scale for people. So I think, yeah, it’s very important.

Taryo, if I can ask you, if you were to rewrite Machines of Loving Grace, which is a beautiful 20 ,000 word or something essay for India, if you were to think about what is that utopic vision of what AI could be for India, what would it be? I mean, obviously not 20 ,000 words, but whatever few ideas you could have now.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think a lot of what was there was universal, but there… You know, there are some things that I would accentuate that are possible when you have such a large population for running, you know, running this kind of large possibility of experiments, right? You have here a very large population for kind of studying and improving human health. You know, there’s, you know, world -class medical research. So I think I would double down especially on some of the sections about, you know, accelerating the cures for diseases. You know, we just had Demis Hassabis who, you know, has, you know, basically solved the protein folding problem with AI and kind of shown us all the way.

And, you know, what we need are like, you know, 50 improvements like that. And, you know, the hope is, you know, working together between the AI developers and, you know, the folks who diffuse AI and do the actual medical research. You know, can all of us, you know, working together between the AI companies. And folks in India really. really accelerate progress. You know, I would also say accelerating the rate of economic development. You know, there is so much technical potential and technical adeptness in India. And it actually almost seems like a perfect case study for the idea that AI could really accelerate economic growth because it seems like the base ingredients are kind of all there and AI could help to tie them together.

So, you know, in the developed world, I’ve wondered, you know, what could AI lead us to, you know, 10 % growth rates, which sounds absurd, but, you know, the thing I imagined in the positive scenario of machines of love and grief. But I think here in India, there’s a lot of catch -up growth to be done. There’s an enormous amount of technical potential and ability. And, you know, So, you know, as I’m seeing, there’s this eagerness to adopt AI. So India is one of the few places in the world where I wonder, you know, could there be 20 or 25 percent growth, which is, you know, sounds absurd, is unknown anywhere in the world. But as I think about this, it kind of stacks all the factors for a very bullish picture of how that growth could happen.

So, you know, I think I could imagine India being one of the, you know, countries in the world that most embodies this, certainly the big, the large country that most embodies this.

And Nandan, with all of these things, there needs to be some unlock. So if you were to advise governments of the world, governments of India, governments of the global south, what should they do to unlock this 20, 25 percent growth that Dario dreams of?

I don’t know about 25 and all that. If I get 10, I’ll be happy. But I think there are a number of things. Obviously, I think people before have talked about the need to create a massive compute. We need to bring in the models. I think the focus has to be on inclusion. I think this AI has to carry everybody. Everybody must feel it. Everybody must benefit from it. And that’s why I think the language is very important. We want people to be able to speak to the computer in their language, in their dialect, like mixing English, Hindi, Tamil, whatever. That needs to be done. I think that’s a big thing. And then I think making agents work for people.

I think if we can make agents work for people, then it means more inclusion because they can get complex things done because you’re hiding all the sophistication behind the agent. So I think there are a lot of things we can do, which you’ll see now in the coming years. We already have three or four examples in agriculture, in healthcare, in language, in education. In electricity, we have a lot of examples. a very good example of P2P trading. So I think all these are examples of how AI will actually benefit people. And then it is, I think as to Dario’s point, India is a country which is very positive about technology in general and AI in particular.

And we need to take advantage of that and not let them down by giving them truly transformative applications using AI, which you will see in the next two to three years.

Nandan, Dario, thank you so much. What a lovely conversation. Thank you. That was great.

Thank you, Honourable Prime Minister Modi, for hosting this summit. India’s leadership on AI is remarkable. It is fitting that India’s leadership on AI is remarkable. India is hosting the first major international AI summit in the Global South. I grew up in Gujarat, watching my parents serve patients at a community health hospital. I joined the Gates Foundation in 2013, inspired by the mission that every person deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life. Earlier this year, I stepped into a new role overseeing the foundation’s work across our Africa and India offices. I never imagined that I would stand on a stage like this, at a moment like this, speaking about technology that may shape the future of billions.

I feel humbled by this opportunity. Many people predict that AI will help the world be better for everyone. Others predict it will only benefit the privileged few. But the fact is, it’s not a matter of prediction. It’s a choice. Technologists can choose whether we use AI to take on the world’s greatest challenges or just the most precious. Or the most profitable ones. Policymakers can choose to build rules that ensure everyone benefits and not just a few. That means governance, safeguards, infrastructure built for inclusion. Here in India, leaders have already made that choice. India has built world -class digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar and UPI. This has improved the ease of living for billions. India is investing in Bhashini and AI Kosh to ensure languages and high -quality data sets are no longer a barrier, and innovators do not have to start from scratch.

During its G20 presidency, India strengthened global consensus around using AI responsibly and for good. Because of these choices, low cost, open -source AI tools are ready and improving lives already. AI is not a leap into the unknown for India. It is the next chapter in a journey of building solutions that serve everyone. If the world follows this approach, AI could possibly compress progress of the next 20 years into five. That progress means fewer children dying from preventable causes, fewer women dying in childbirth, more infectious diseases eliminated, millions rising out of poverty. If we step back, the real test of AI is simple. Will it help make people’s lives better? That fundamental question guides how we think about our work in health, education, and agriculture.

Since 2000, the world has cut child deaths into half. that represents millions of lives saved. Within our lifetimes, we could see the end of preventable child deaths. AI can help us get there faster. In sub -Saharan Africa, there are 6 million fewer health workers than we require. AI tools, when deployed correctly, can free up time of existing workers so they can help more patients. Last month, Bill announced Horizon 1000 in partnership with OpenAI, the government of Rwanda, and ministries of health across the regions. The effort will deploy AI tools in 1 ,000 primary health clinics across Africa. Imagine visiting a local health center that offers AI -powered guidance. Simple cases can be resolved immediately with the help of OpenAI. complex ones are referred appropriately and millions of lives are saved.

AI will not just speed up innovation. It can help bring that innovation to community clinics, to health workers like my parents, and to the patients who depend on them. That is expanded access. Another area where AI can make a material difference is in education. There are two hard problems in education. First, accurately assessing where each child is in his or her learning journey. And second, once a teacher knows that, helping her customize her lesson plans for that child. Earlier in my career, I worked to bring Pratham’s teaching at the right level model to Africa, to Ghana. I have seen firsthand that works, but the challenge has always been about cost and scalability. AI now makes that challenge surmountable.

It makes activities like personalized assessment far more affordable and easier to implement at scale. With Wadwani AI here in India, we developed its tool that analyzes short audio clips of children reading. Each assessment takes only two minutes. It costs about five pesa. That is less than one cent per child. The result is more children being supported, more hardworking teachers having the time and ability to do things that they love. It is a very powerful tool. It is the most effective tool that can help the next generation. Six million children are now in the world of AI. in Rajasthan and my home state of Gujarat have already benefited from this revolution. So it is clear AI will make a difference in health and education.

But can it also help advance economic opportunities for the poorest? More than half of the workforce in the global south is engaged in agriculture. Every country that has moved out of poverty has seen rising farm productivity. For a farmer, every cropping season comes down to a handful of decisions. What to plant, when to plant, what seeds to buy, what fertilizers to use, when to sell. If even one of these decisions goes wrong, it can wipe out an entire year of income. And that does not just affect the harvest. It can also affect the economy. It affects the choices the farmer’s family can make for that year. AI can ease that uncertainty. It can provide timely, localized information so farmers can make better decisions with confidence.

Earlier this week, Bill and I met Annapurna, a banana farmer in Andhra Pradesh. She showed us how she used an AI assistant on her phone to identify a pest attacking her crop. She took a photo on her app. Within 48 hours, a drone had precisely treated the affected area. She saw technology help her in real time to save her harvest and protect her family for the season. She was able to get a phone call from her family and her friends. When Bill and Melinda first talked about the Gates Foundation, When Bill and Melinda first talked about the Gates Foundation, the vision behind it was simple. Innovation should serve those who are left behind. At that time, it meant vaccines, diagnostics, better delivery systems.

Today, it also must mean artificial intelligence. Globally, the Gates Foundation has three objectives. No mother or baby should die of preventable causes. The next generation of people should grow up in a world without infectious diseases. And millions of people should escape the clutches of poverty. AI can accelerate progress across all three. For the first time, we can deliver precision at scale. Replacing one -size -fits -all, we can deliver precision at scale. We can deliver precision at scale with the right -fit solutions that are cheaper, faster, and more inclusive. To support these efforts, the Gates Foundation is launching Advantage India for AI. Yes, that is AI for AI. This initiative will bring together innovators and philanthropists across India and the Global South to advance AI for social good.

Ultimately, history will not remember the models we perfect or the speeches we give. It will remember the lives we improve. It’s not a prediction. It’s a choice. Thank you.

services impacting millions of lives. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani.

Distinguished guests, my fellow Indians, namaste. The Global AI Impact Summit is a defining moment in India’s tech history. A moment when India pledges to make AI one of the driving forces to realize its dream of a Vixit Bharat, the dream of becoming a fully developed nation by 2047, the glorious centenary of our independence. We are deeply honored that our most respected Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, is the guide, philosopher and leader of this summit. Honorable Minister Sri Vaishnav and his wonderful team deserve full praise for organizing this summit on a grand scale befitting India’s ambition. Modiji’s vision of AI -powered Vixit Bharat is also a template for a Vixit Global South. If wisely used, I believe AI can usher in an era of superabundance.

A world without poverty and a future of prosperity for all the 8 billion people on our beautiful planet is now within sight, within reach. Friends, artificial intelligence is a technology that can be used to create It is not just another technology. For the first time, we are going to create a new technology Humans are creating human -like systems that can learn, speak, analyze, move, and produce autonomously. AI is the mantra that powers every yantra or every machine and system to work faster, better, and smarter. I see AI as a modern -day Akshay Patra, the legendary vessel in Mahabharata that provided endless nourishment to all. Likewise, AI offers limitless augmentation in knowledge, efficiency, and productivity. We are only at the dawn of this era.

The best of AI is yet to come. Distinguished participants in this summit, today the world is debating a profound question. Will AI concentrate power in the hands of a few or will it democratize opportunity for all? Do we act as isolated nations or as a united global family? Our polarized world stands at a fork. One path has led to a situation where AI is scarce and expensive. Compute is concentrated, data is controlled, and capability is locked behind barriers of capital and geography in the global north. In this dismal scenario, inequality widens between nations within societies and across generations. But there is another path, a future where AI is available, affordable, and beneficial to all. As our Prime Minister said, India believes in this second future.

Dear friends, from the podium of this summit today, I want to make a bold prediction. India will emerge as one of the greatest AI powers in the world in the 21st century. My confidence is validated by an undeniable truth. In the coming decades, no country in the world can match India’s strength in demography, democracy, development, digital infrastructure, data generation, AI harvest. Let me begin, as was said many times this morning, what India has achieved in the past 10 years. First, India is the world’s largest mobile data consumer. Nearly 1 billion internet users. Data costs are higher than the world’s largest mobile data consumer. Among the lowest globally and in terms of quality, there is no difference between Delhi and the remotest Indian village.

Second, Aadhaar, 1 .4 billion digital IDs. Third, UPI processes over 12 billion transactions monthly. Fourth, India ranks among the top three startup ecosystems with 100 ,000 startups and 100 plus unicorns. Fifth, India’s secure and inclusive digital public infrastructure stack is now being adopted by countries around the globe. Friends, in all humility, I wish to state that Jio, with over 500 million loyal subscribers, was privileged to play a leading role in this transformation across broadband, 4G, 5G and home connectivity. With equal humility, I would like to announce that Jio will play an even bigger role in India’s AI transformation. Today, on behalf of the Reliance Group and Jio Intelligence, I want to make three announcements. Announcement 1. Jio connected India to the internet era.

Jio will now connect India to the intelligence era. We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy, and every facet of social development and every service of government. Jio will do so with the same reliability, quality, scale, and extreme affordability that transformed connectivity. India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we can. We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy, and every facet the cost of data. Announcement 2. Jio together with Reliance will invest 10 lakh crores over the next 7 years starting this year. This is not speculative investment. It is not for chasing valuation. This is patient, disciplined, nation -building capital designed to create durable economic value and strategic resilience for decades to come.

Distinguished participants, the biggest constraint in AI today is not talent or imagination. It is scarcity and high cost of compute. Therefore, here is my third announcement. Jio Intelligence will build India’s sovereign compute infrastructure through three bold initiatives. One, gigawatt -scale data centers. We already started construction on multi -gigawatt AI -ready data centers at Jamnagar. Over 120 megawatts will come online in the second half of 2026 this year and a clear path to gigawatt -scale compute for training and large -scale inference. Two, our green energy advantage. We have an in -house energy advantage with up to 10 gigawatts of ready green power surplus anchored by solar in both Kach and Andhra Pradesh. Three, a nationwide edge compute. An edge compute layer deeply integrated with Jio’s network will make intelligence responsive, low latency and affordable, close to where Indians live, learn, and work.

From kirana stores to clinics, from classrooms to farms, intelligence will live at the edge. Our resolve is clear. Make intelligence as ubiquitous as connectivity. When compute becomes infrastructure, innovation will become inevitable. Friends, geo -intelligence is guided by five non -negotiable principles. First, AI for India’s deep tech and advanced manufacturing leadership. Reaching not just large enterprises but agriculture, small businesses and the informal sector. Geo -intelligence will not simply be a search or an ask tool. It will primarily be a resource for multiplying productivity and efficiency. Thank you. Second, world leading multilingual AI capability across all Indian languages. When farmers and artisans speak to AI in their own words and students learn in their own mother tongue, this is not convenience, this is inclusion.

Jio AI Bharat ki bhasha mein bolega, Bharat ki sanskriti mein phulega, aur Bharat ki mitti mein phalega. Third, responsibility, security, data residency and trust as Jio’s core guarantees, not afterthought. Fourth, we will prove that AI does not take away jobs. Rather, it will create new high -skill work opportunities. And fifth, the AI system will not only provide jobs for the people, but also provide jobs for the people. Our story has shifted from who has the best model to who can build the strongest ecosystem for speed and scale of usage. Therefore, we will build deep partnership ecosystem with Indian enterprises, startups, IIT, IISC and research institutions. We will work shoulder to shoulder with India’s leading industrial groups to embed AI across manufacturing, logistics, energy, finance, retail, agriculture and healthcare.

We will empower startups with affordable compute and co -development platforms. We will aspire to produce global breakthroughs in compute architecture, foundation models and energy efficiency, designed in India, rooted in our values, powered by our talent and scaled for humanity. And we will partner with the very best tech companies in the world, not as importers of intelligence, but as co -architects of a new AI century. Dear friends, I believe that social relevance, not momentary craze, should drive AI growth in India. Jio has already started AI applications for the most pressing challenges in inclusive development. In education, we have Jio Shikshak, an adaptive AI teaching assistant in 22 languages. When 250 million school children and 50 million students in higher education are empowered by AI, teachers no power on earth can match India’s talent wealth.

In healthcare, Jio Arogya AI delivering first medical guidance in under five minutes in local languages on any phone. In agriculture, Jio Krishi converting satellite imagery and programming AI into a new technology. Precision weather into simple voice -first advice to 140 million farmers to help improve their income. In everyday life, GeoBharat IQ, a voice -first AI companion, helping Indians learn, earn, and access government services at Bharat scale. From wearables to fully connected homes, geo -frames, an AI glass device, and next -generation AI devices will make intelligence truly ambient, as effortless and as natural as human conversations. Through GeoHotStar, AI will multiply Indian creativity with multilingual storytelling. We will popularize India’s rich cultural heritage with futuristic technology, enhancing India’s soft power globally.

Friends, this inaugural global AI impact summit in India has received a massive response. What does that show? It shows that AI is now becoming a people’s movement worldwide. The success of this movement hinges critically on global cooperation and not polarization. Be it chips or rare earths, AI works its magic through sharing, not hoarding, through collaborations, not conflicts. The unique strength of India is that India serves as the vital bridge connecting the global south and the global north. After all, south or north, east or west, all of us have only one earth, one family and one future. Today, at this summit, let us all pledge to transform this noble aspiration into reality using the most powerful gift of the human mind, AI.

Let us combine intelligence with empathy and let us build a better future for all. Thank you. Jai Hind.

Thank you so much.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to invite on stage speakers for our next remarkable panel discussion. I would like to invite our esteemed speakers, Her Excellency Paula Bogante Zamora, Minister of Science and Technology, Costa Rica. His Excellency Omar Al -Olamah, Minister of State for AI, United Arab Emirates. Mr. Sriram Krishnan, Senior Policy Advisor for AI, White House. This discussion will be moderated by Dr. Samir Saran, President, Observer Research Foundation. Could I please request our esteemed panelists to kindly come on the stage?

Good afternoon. We have 20 minutes and we have a fantastic panel. So I’m going to dive straight into the conversations. we’ve been here through the day and we’ve heard a few ideas and and propositions and i’m going to basically ask each one of you to elaborate from your vantage points on some of those propositions the first of course would be what does impact and diffusion mean where you sit the opportunity and the challenges of ai are of course different and differentially experienced so from your vantage point what does impact mean from your national perspective and a global perspective and of course the diffusion opportunity and maybe i can start with sriram the diffusion opportunity that we are sitting on today

thank you for having me it’s such an honor to be here i want to congratulate you know prime minister modi and everyone for just having this fantastic event and it’s been such a privilege to be here these last few days i know we have 20 minutes i’ll keep this very short With the Trump administration, when we got into office about 13 months ago, we decided President Trump immediately charted us with coming up with an AI action plan. And it came from a sense of positivity and optimism when it comes to AI. And in July last year, we set three priorities for what we believe America should follow. One, we want to build infrastructure. So President Trump has done a lot of work on making sure we can build data centers, making sure that we build grid capacity, making sure that we can build infrastructure, while at the same time, without having regular Americans see their power and energy bills go up.

So that’s infrastructure. There’s a lot more there, but in the interest of time, I’ll just keep going. Number two is innovation. At the heart of AI are amazing entrepreneurs and builders, a lot of whom you saw on stage here this morning. And we want to be sure that they can continue building these amazing models and applications and chips and everything else they do. So we’ve been doing a lot of work there. And I think most essentially, we’ve been trying to make sure they’re not encumbered by red tape and bureaucracy. So President Trump signed an executive order in December, which tries to stop onerous legislation from getting in the way of innovation. And third is we want to share this technology with our allies and the rest of the world, whether it is our advanced chips from NVIDIA or AMD or Google, or whether it be the models and applications on top.

We want to share our technology with our partners all over the world. And we’ve been doing a lot of work there. And we’ve been spending a lot of time on that. So those are the three things that we have been focused on.

Great. Minister Alulama, let me turn to you. Again, a powerhouse in the region, powerhouse globally now. AI, a big feature of your government, a big priority in the bilateral as well between UAE and India. How do you see the opportunity, Minister, in terms of both the ability to empower your own people and region, but also others around the world, the role UAE can play here?

Thank you very much. And I must say that it’s very impressive to see India convene the world on such an important subject like artificial intelligence. And also hearing His Excellency Prime Minister Modi this morning emphasize how India wants to not just be a champion for the global south, but the champion for transparent AI, the champion for open source systems. And that is reassuring, especially in a world where we have haves and have nots. And if I’m going to reflect that on the UAE, we are a country that is blessed to be part of the haves, right? We are a country that has infrastructure that is able to build artificial intelligence. And that is incredible. We are able to diffuse it across society.

So if you look at Microsoft’s AI diffusion report, the UAE ranks first globally. locally in the UAE the main focus is AI for quality of life improvement if you look at it some countries are looking for economic gains others are looking for political advantages we are looking for quality of life improvement because we believe that this will translate into every other domain in the future if you look at externally we were at a certain point of time in our history have not so we were a country that wasn’t as rich as it was pre -oil and in that we understand the need to give back and the need to invest alongside and the need to create with others and you see that the UAE played a big role in building data centers and empowering people with AI literacy and you know being able to use AI across Africa Latin America and many other continents as well I think we’re going to continue to do that

Minister I want to ask you one short question you were the first minister of AI in the world

yes

like do you have bragging rights now like does everyone come and like bow to you

and actually you know what saddens me is I expected by 2026 that every country will have a minister of AI and we still haven’t gotten to that point yet but thank you

and I know that Minister Alulama became a minister before he did his military service so that’s something all of us should think about you they picked the right man for the right job so I think well done to the leadership in UAE Minister Zamora another small country another beautiful country again another country that could really transform itself using the power of AI and of course there are headwinds that you need to encounter so from your vantage point how do you assess this opportunity this challenge perhaps this transformative engine

so the one thing is that we need to you know talk about and have clear for everyone to understand is that the reality from countries that have passed like your excellency was saying is way different from the ones that have not right or don’t have weak i come from a small country 5 .2 million people which is laughable from india standards uh small economy one of the smallest countries in latin america and we have done a lot of things better than other latin american countries the truth of the matter is depending on who do you compare we’re way lower than we or we have much more to improve than what we thought we had to do ai has one of the things that ai is bringing to up to our attention is we have to do a diagnosis as to where do you stand on the road of improvement economy improvement and you have to face reality in the sense of this is where you need to focus on and that’s what ai is bringing up to our attention so and this is a homework that every country has to do and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do it and we have to do that are way ahead of the others, they need to look at us and say, how do we help you with the AI implementation?

And by the way, what do I mean by that? 70 % of 190 plus countries have implemented 5G. You cannot think of AI without 5G. So what are we doing to help the countries that are

– In the government folks. Right.

What are they doing? How can we help them? When we started working on an AI strategy, four countries out of 33 Latin American Caribbean countries had an AI strategy, four out of 33. So what did we do? We spoke with the OECD. We’re working on an AI toolkit to help every country understand where do they stand. So again, what is AI doing to us is bringing to our attention, where do you stand in the AI race and what do you need to do to keep improving? But we’re not going to be able to get to the AI race. That’s the ideal point unless – the countries that are ahead of us, look down and say, this is where we should be helping.

More than just bringing AI solutions is how do you build the base to then start implementing AI solutions?

You raise a very important point. How is global cooperation going to play out in this domain? How are partnerships going to serve humanity? I think that’s one of the key principal conversations we want at this forum, right? So let me ask you. Let me start the second round with you on what is the kind of multilateralism that is likely to emerge and how can countries with 5 million population, but by the way, let me just tell you, Minister, between India and Costa Rica together, we are 1 .5 billion people. So don’t worry. It’s big numbers. So we will negotiate together. Now, my question to you is, what kind of multilateralism is going to work for countries such as yourselves?

Is it going to be through a regional grouping basis? Is it going to be through? Is it going to be through like -minded? Is it going to be through a regional grouping basis? countries, how is the multilateral arrangement of the future going to look like?

I think a little bit of both. You know, you said India and Costa Rica. Let’s talk about Latin America and the Caribbean. If we combine all 33 countries, we’re talking 650 million people. Then the number sounds attractive, right? So I do think that we need to like -minded countries get together within regions and start negotiating or deciding what the path is going to be. And we can do it with countries from other regions, say Asia and Costa Rica or Africa and Latin America, not Costa Rica. The truth of the matter is we’re sharing some common problems, some countries, small economies, for example. What do we need to do to make sure that we keep moving forward and we call the attention on the countries that are, you know, in the upper floors, let’s say.

Catch their attention, right?

Minister Alulama, you’ve been in this forever, so tell me how is the World Government Summit and the big events that you host, how do you think partnerships are going to emerge in this particular technology domain, in this highly polarized world people are being forced to choose how do we retain the ability to be able to build bridges across

so this has evolved as a discussion and things have changed drastically over the past nine years since I was appointed, historically no one was talking about you know trying to confidentially keep what they have for themselves and not discuss it with others or trying to create groups of you know influence whether it’s on the left or on the right but with the advent of LLMs and very powerful AI systems that can do things that historically were not even seen to be possible in the next 10 or 20 years, we’re seeing a shift in narrative the UAE’s approach has always been the world needs a convener the world needs a place where you can have dialogue and I think what is going to harm the world is ensuring that there isn’t dialogue and there are silos even at the height of the Cold War there were dialogues on nuclear proliferation there were dialogues on the danger of nuclear weapons and there were countries like Switzerland at the time where the world could come and talk about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable and we believe that the UAE can play that role it can convene the world it can come and put the topics of importance and it can ensure as well that we can magnify the voices not just of the countries in our region but as our Excellency the Minister said countries in Latin America and the Caribbean countries that today are unrepresented in this dialogue we attend the G20 meetings and there was a process on the Hiroshima Accords on AI and we are very happy to be here and we are very happy to be here and we are very happy to be here and we are very happy to be here And in that you can see it was only the 20 countries or 25 countries that were there.

The AI dialogue needs to be a global one. It cannot be one that is limited to one geography or one set of countries.

Shriram, let me take from a U .S. perspective, from a Trump administration perspective, you are investing in building partnerships, whether it is a critical minerals group or the Paxilica that’s gained much currency in recent conversations. How is multilateralism of the future for you?

Before I get to that, I think I want to emphasize something which His Excellency, the Minister mentioned a moment ago, which is Prime Minister Modi just outlined a totally compelling vision for what AI can mean to all of humanity. And I think it was so compelling in so many themes. And I also want to particularly congratulate the Sarvam team for their launch yesterday. I think it is quite inspirational. terms of what a small team of entrepreneurs have accomplished in such a short time. And as somebody who kind of nerds out on these things, I found that very, very impressive. I think speaking for us in the administration, we approach this from a spirit of partnership.

We want to see the world leverage and use our technologies. You saw many of the companies represented here on stage today, whether it be our advanced semiconductor chips, whether it be people building models, or whether it be people building applications. You can kind of choose who you want to work with. If you want to build a model, you’re going to be training on NVIDIA or AMD. If you want to, you know, you’re probably going to be your use case. And if you look at the action plan, we have put a lot of emphasis into making sure we can can export our AI. Just to give you one example, we entered into this AI Accelerator Partnership with the UAE back in May last year as part of President Trump’s visit.

And I think that’s kind of the template for many more to come. You mentioned PacSilica. I think the announcement was done today. I think it’s going to be formalized tomorrow. That is another partnership headed up by my dear friend Jacob Helberg in the State Department, which is about how do we ensure supply chain security and do it with all of our allies. And we’ve had many amazing countries sent on to it, and I think it’s a great effort. So what I would emphasize is, you know, we are trying to approach this with the spirit of partnership, where we want to bring our technologies to our allies and to kind of really work with them together on all things AI.

So let me pose the final question to this panel. As we reach our 20 -minute mark, I thought we should. perhaps look back at the first session this morning when I thought President Macron made a very interesting speech which had a number of issues that we could all take, we could actually have a debate on. You know, for example, one of the questions he raised was the nature of regulation. And I think the implicit in his speech was the question of the balance between innovation and restraint in some sense, right? So maybe as we conclude this conversation from all of the panelists, we could start with how do we see the future of AI regulation? And maybe Minister Alulama, I could start with you this time, then come to you, Minister Zamora, and end with you, Sriram, on regulation and what do you think about it?

So let me start with you.

So are you commenting on President Macron’s statement on regulation?

No, no, no. I’m just saying he kind of very early morning, he told us about some questions that we need to answer on safety, guardrails, care, care, empathy. That’s the question, right? So what are we designing it for?

So there isn’t a one model fits all when it comes to regulating technology. And I think as well, there isn’t a country that’s going to get it right from the get -go because they are all knowing. And we’ve seen that through many iterations of different regulations that were put in place and then revoked and removed. In the UAE, our view is simple. First, we actually like to engage. So we engage aggressively with the different partners, whether it’s from the private sector or other countries as well. Second is we like to build up gradually rather than go from extreme to extreme. And I’ll give you a simple example. You’re going to realize that when ChatGPT came out, in a short period of time, there was a country in Europe, I’m not going to mention the country, who announced that they’re banning ChatGPT.

In the same month, the cabinet in the UAE announced that we are going to be in brief. We’re going to be embracing RLMs and ChatGPT completely. and getting as many people in the country to use these tools as possible. And this sounded counterintuitive. You know, why are they banning it and these guys are jumping on board? Our assessment was that this tool is going to be a net positive for the society. Now, with that, if there are negative ramifications, the way that we’re going to approach it is gradual restriction rather than going from zero to 100. That’s how the UAE approached it. And we typically like to work with others to ensure that our regulation as well are compatible with other, whether it’s blocks or countries.

So you see that there are certain regulations that are compatible with India. Many regulations are compatible with the US. And maybe Her Excellency the Minister will say this. For countries of our size, we can’t bully large companies. And I don’t think we can afford, and it’s true, we can’t afford to swing left and right on the pendulum just because we’re trying to threaten them. Our approach should always be approaches of cooperation, of collaboration, and also of continuous proactive assessment of the impact of artisans. I’m just going to end with one final example. Today, the conversations that social media is about, right? So this is one of the things that we are hearing. And my question is, it took social media.

So we’ve had social media for 15 years now. It took us 15 years to reach to that point. And today, the only answer is that we restrict. There has to be constant assessment and proactive engagement with the private sector, while at the same time putting constant restrictions, you know, slowly but continuously to ensure that you don’t have to go to the extreme. I know that Europe is very wise when it comes to them putting the regulations for themselves. Our approach in the UAE is to try to engage and see what comes out.

Very diplomatic. But, you know, I think. Your point is well taken. Regulation is an art form and not necessarily the exercise of a Hammersmith, you know, policy option for the government. Very well taken. Minister Zamora, your view.

So regulation, the way I see it, depends on the view of the beholder. Who are we talking about? Because I hear regulation and innovation. Sure, how much money the five big tech companies invested last year on innovation? Over $200 billion, which is also the amount of money India is planning on investing for the next two years. Costa Rica’s GDP is $100 billion. So that gives you a perspective. Innovation, what’s the average percentage invested on innovation per GDP for OECD members? 2 .7 % of the GDP. Costa Rica, 0 .30%. Latin America, 0 .65%. We’re not even at 1%. So we say, let’s regulate innovation. Let’s start innovating first, and let’s then regulate it. So as His Excellency was saying, it’s not a one -fits -all sort of formula.

And then I go back to… We have to think when talking about regulation, what is each country’s reality? How about data? Let’s talk about data. Data privacy, data governance. How about the value of data? Because some of the countries, that’s all we can provide because we have to still, again, we’re building, working on building blocks. How about the value of data, which at the end of the day, it’s what algorithms need to become better. How about talking about regulating data and the value of data? Those are things, again, it depends on the perspective of each country and what value can we provide, can we put on the table? And let’s discuss that because we can talk about ethics.

We can talk about governance. We can talk about the goal of AI, which should always be the improving of humans’ lives. But what is the reality of each country nowadays when thinking about data? I mean, of AI.

Shriram, let me turn to you for the final word. The prime minister this morning, Indian prime minister. This morning said very eloquently. that AI is India’s destiny. And in some sense, that would define the governance approach for the opportunity that it offers us, right? So now in that backdrop, in the American tradition of building entrepreneurial value, how do you, where do you tilt on this debate?

Well, I think for us, we’ve always sort of seen AI through a lens of optimism and positivity in terms of what it can do for American citizens and the world at large. When it comes to regulation, there are some things which we absolutely do care about. We care about protecting children. We care about protecting IP rights. We care about making sure that AI doesn’t have censorship or doesn’t have ideological biases embedded of any kind. But having said that, what we are trying to battle right now with this executive order is we don’t want a patchwork of regulation. We are still very, very early when it comes to AI. And we don’t want to hinder innovation by having bureaucratic red tape or having in America 50 different states with 50 different rules that entrepreneurs have to deal with before they launch something.

So that’s been our approach. So it’s more about coherence and predictability and certainty that allows innovation. So, yes, we need clarity in regulation so that entrepreneurs can do what they do best.

I think this has been a fantastic conversation. 20 minutes of pure content. So thank you very much to all three of you for coming to India, for sharing your wisdom with us. And, of course, best of luck for your AI journeys. And hopefully our paths will intersect and we will build a prosperous future together. Thank you very much.

Please join me in applauding this. Thank you so much, Your Excellencies, for this insightful and enriching conversation. I thank Her Excellency Paula Poganty Zamora, His Excellency Omar Al -Olamah, Mr. Shriram Krishnan, and also Dr. Samir Surin for moderating this conversation. Ladies and gentlemen.