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from the world. We had practically every major AI player in the world participating in large numbers. We had so many startups getting the opportunity to showcase their work. Overall, the quality of discussion was phenomenal. If you look at the ministerial dialogue, the leaders plenary, the main inauguration function, the summit, the quality of participation, the quality of dialogue was phenomenal. Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Manav AI, which is AI of the humans, by the humans, for the humans. I think that was very well accepted practically every major AI player in the world. The ministerial, which we had the bilateral, which… I and my colleague Sri Jitinji had. Everywhere, practically every minister resonated with this and everybody felt happy that we have brought the discussion about responsible and ethical AI to the forefront by involving two and a half lakh students in this entire journey.

We had a Guinness World Record for that involvement of the students. We also have a lot of investment pledges I was just asking Abhishekji and Krishnanji I think the number is growing each day so it’s already crossed 250 billion dollars for the infra -related investments and about 20 billion dollars for the VC deep tech investments which have been committed by investors. This is a very important sign for us. the numbers are important but what is important is the world has confidence on India’s role in the new AI age. That’s very very important for all of us because as we have seen there is always a always a need to bring out the talent that we have, bring out the energy that we have in front of the world so that the world recognizes that.

I would also like to share with you that the action summit, the previous one had about 60 signatories in the final declaration. We have already crossed 70. There are many ministers who are here and they are discussing with us. So I think by the time we close the summit tomorrow, we have, as you know, we have extended it by one more day. We believe that it will cross 80. All the major countries have already signed. If you feel that somebody has not signed, you need not speculate on that. All the important AI, people who matter in AI, they have all signed. We will be giving you the formal number tomorrow once the summit closes. That is the way it should be done.

That’s the right way of doing things. We also had many interesting episodes where I met a very young innovator today morning and even in the previous couple of days back also. Some very young people have done so much work in AI, which was very, very encouraging. Because if the youth sees that hope in this new world, the youth has that positivity. about this technology. We also found very strong endorsement of our policy of working on all the five layers and our focus on having a sovereign bouquet of models. The models which were released, I tell you, in every bilateral that I had with the industry leaders, they are really surprised at the quality of output with such few resources, with such the kind of resources which some of the frontier labs have at their disposal, and with such frugal resources our engineers and researchers have produced such good models which is what gives huge, huge endorsement to our efforts.

I would also like to thank all the team members. All the stakeholders, right from media, from the organizers, from ITPO, and special thanks to the MEA and Ministry of Home Affairs, Delhi Police. for so much effort. They have tirelessly put in making this a grand success. Thank you everybody who participated in this. And also thanks to the youth who endorsed this, who took this so positively that whatever little effort that Congress made for trying to disrupt the summit was really, really, I mean, the youth very clearly said that this is their exhibition. It is the exhibition. This is the summit for the youth who want to make the best use of it. They don’t believe in the negative politics that Congress was trying to play.

We had some bad choices here, people coming into the exhibition, and we took immediate action against anybody who tried to demean the… demean the good work that is being done by our startups and by engineers, by our people who are working in the AI field. That is something that we are a very open -minded government. We believe in taking your feedback. We believe in working with you. We believe in the goal of Vixit Bharat, and that’s why we would like to tirelessly work with you for this goal, which our Prime Minister has given that vision for our entire country, and we have to do it together. This has to be done by all the 140 crore of our citizens who believe in this common goal of Vixit Bharat, and these are steps in that direction.

Friends, tomorrow we will be also laying the foundation for our next… …semiconductor plant here in Uttar Pradesh. I’ll invite all of you to join that ceremony also and on 28th we’ll start the commercial production from Micron facility and that will be one of the largest facilities that Micron has practically more than 10 cricket fields kind of facility it’s very large and that is going to be inaugurated on 28th so all these are steps very methodical step by step moving in the direction for creating that foundation which our Prime Minister is laying for the young generation for Vixit Bharat for all of you who are watching it on TV or social media our Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Ji is laying the foundation for the country, which will be a developed nation by 2047.

I’ll take questions, and like in the past, we’ll follow the first row,

Thank you, sir. First of all, please identify yourself and your organization’s name before asking the question. And as sir has said, start from the left. Yes, please.

Hi, sir. I am Nishant Ketu from ANI. My question is, how do you see that India’s role in… useful tools for day -to -day Python development and Python work? So we have developed a program which is like absolutely beginner… Even if you have zero knowledge in Python, you can join this program. And in 30 days, you will be becoming pro of Python. That also using AI. You will be not becoming a Python developer. You will be becoming a 10x Python developer. And the best part, like we have democratized this program. So this 30 -day program is just for Rs .199. Can you believe that? Prime Minister began this on the 16th when this program began. And today where we are.

What is the observation Prime Minister has given to you or indication? He has given to you. Sorry? Observation or indication that he has given to you about AI Impact Summit.

Next. Please.

Hi, this is Deepak Ajwani from Economic Times Digital Team. I have one simple ask. Have there been certain guidelines, guardrails that have been put together by all the countries that got represented yesterday on the stage? on effective, ethical, and responsible use of AI. Is there a paper that you can bring about maybe tomorrow where all of you have agreed that this is at least the first set of blueprint which can be iterative later? Thank you. Hi, sir. Shauvik from Mint. Sir, two questions. One is on the participation from big tech companies. Have there been conversations? The global tech companies. Have there been conversations with global tech companies in terms of the role that they will play in India as far as public services are concerned?

Because each of them spoke about AI and its role in public services. And secondly, the models that were launched under the AI mission, they’ve also been backed. Is there a takeaway from the summit in terms of where they go from here? Thank you. So, Oyeek from Money Control. So, just wanted to ask you, yesterday you had, you had the frontier AI commitments. So, the declaration will also come tomorrow. So the frontier AI commitment is voluntary in nature. The Delhi Declaration, I’m assuming, is non -binding. So how do we ensure that this does not remain on paper? How do we ensure implementation?

Can you repeat your question?

So I’m saying the frontier AI commitment is voluntary in nature, and the Delhi Declaration, whenever it comes, is non -binding. So how do we ensure that this does not remain on paper? Like the declarations, commitments made in the…

Anybody else on front row? Anyone? Okay, please.

Sir, Ashish from Business Standard. All of the three previous summits had a focus area when it came to the declarations. If you could share just one line on what would be our focus area when the declaration is signed.

Please. You are close? Yeah.

Hi, sir. Shubhan from the Economic Times. I understand that the declaration will be coming tomorrow, and as you mentioned, some 80 -odd countries will maybe… The list may be as high as… Now it’s 70, maybe up to 80. I just wonder… I wanted to understand, since some of the last… Some of the previous summits have seen significant difference of opinion in India, what were some of the areas where it was relatively easier to build consensus? and if possible, what were some of the areas where it took a little bit of time?

Next. Last.

Hi, sir. We look AI -ready globally, but my question would be for the last person standing in India, how far and how long it will take to reach to that one last person in India? How long will it take for AI to reach there? Very good question. Hi, sir. This is Lalit from Best Media Info. My question is, we have been seeing that traditional media sectors like TV, radio, print, they have been fighting for ad ex, for advertising revenue, while digital is scaling up. Is there any way that AI or any policy can actually help bring balance in this revenue share of advertisement? My second question would be, there has been a long -pending TRP guidelines overhaul that was formulated.

Normally, you know, it was meant to bring multi -agency system into the picture and removal of landing pages. We just want to know where or in what stage that guidelines are in, and can we expect the guidelines coming in anytime soon? Sir, I am Prashant from AsiaNet News. There were very good sessions in this summit. How do you wish to take down to the grassroots level how these sessions can help the lives of common man?

So, there are questions about where do we go from here? What will be the implementation? I’ll take all these questions one by one. I think, friends, the journey so far has been very meaningful, very methodical, starting from building the base and working through all the layers of the IC, and creating that foundational level of work. and now getting the entire world to come here, deliberate, interact with our industry. Now we’ll take the next level of our AI mission where we will be focusing and taking to a totally new level of models, a new level of common compute, new level of safety. We have so many collaborations agreed in the last few days, which is where I would like to address that point about paper versus real action.

Yes, there is lots and lots of real action, real MOUs, real understanding, which has happened in the past few days, where many of these things which concern us as well as the entire world will be working in a very collaborative manner. That is the… That is the real action which will come out of it. We will be very soon start working on the AI mission 2 .0, which will be definitely bigger than what it was in the AI mission 1 .0. Many of the goals we had set for ourselves in the mission 1 .0 are on the verge of getting completed and many of them have actually exceeded. We wanted about 10 ,000 GPUs. We have 38 ,000 already and another 20 ,000 very soon going to be launched.

We have foundational models. We were looking at two foundational models. We have a bouquet of 12 models and very multimodal, reasonably, I mean very well rated. We wanted to have an AI safety institute. We have now 12 institutes working on this in a network mode. So all these goals that we had set for ourselves are getting implemented very rapidly. So now we have to set bigger goals. And achieve them as a part of the AI mission 2 .0. our Honourable Prime Minister has always led from the front the vision Manav AI that he gave yesterday is something which everybody resonated everybody accepted in the ministerial dialogue, in the bilaterals everywhere people thought that first time they have heard a vision which is so compelling and it just cuts across every civilization every country this is meaningful for everybody every generation, every sector every country because ultimately it’s the humanity which matters the most and that’s why this vision resonated with everybody big tech participated very much in this same the participation of the startups and young innovators it was very good participation there is huge consensus on the declaration we just want to maximize the numbers we in India should be we are not going to be reading that effort.

It’s so natural to do it. And given the size of this summit which has happened, it’s natural to set a number so that the record is always here. So that’s why we are trying to maximize that in a very… In fact, Abhishek… Do a little more work. He was thinking he would take a day off. But no, he’s not going to get a day off. So do a little more work. Very important question which came is about diffusion, about the last person. How do we see the benefit? If you go there… rich countries, you will find that 5G is very patchy. It’s not very the way it is in our country. Vaisahi effort isme bhi lagayenge.

Aur isme bahut mehnat karni padhegi. And we are prepared to put that hard work, put that effort. Our Prime Minister keeps inspiring us that for us, we should not stop till the benefit reaches the last person in the society. That is our goal always. And we in BJP have always had this basic tenet as Antiyode. We believe in inclusive growth. And if you look at Honourable Prime Minister’s programs, each and every program, whether it is Jan Dhan, whether it is the Swachh Bharat, whether it is construction of toilets, whether it is Hargarh Nal Sejan, each and every program has been created and executed to bring the benefits. Thank you. We believe in inclusive growth as a basic political philosophy, and that’s why here also that same political philosophy will be reflected.

I have absolutely no doubt about it because this is a family in which inclusive growth is one of the most important tenets of our thought process. There are questions about guardrails. You might have seen the first major, first time all the big AI players came on the same stage and agreed. Voluntary is more like saying it, but of course we have discussed with them, and all of them have come to this consensus. Taking those first steps was very, very important, and I don’t want to… exaggerate this but if you ask any major policy leader in the world and I had so many meetings today each and everyone is surprised how we could pull together the entire AI industry coming forward and started openly.

Major major achievement and this kind of achievement shows how India can be leading the thought process. We also had Pax Silica today which is very important for us from the semiconductor industry perspective from resilient supply chain resilient value chain perspective and the fact that we are today seen whether in Europe or in Australia or in US or in Southeast Asia everywhere we are seen as a trusted country that itself speaks a lot about how our Prime Minister has conducted the foreign policy how our Prime Minister has developed that trust among the entire global every sector every moment every geography every part of the world we will Youth Congress I have already responded

next room just a second second room please we will come one by one yes please

MIBC related questions I will answer later today we will talk about AI mission we will talk about AI mission next time

Namaskar Sir Sir Sir Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. These are my two questions.

Anybody else?

Sejal Sharma from Hindustan Times.

Just a second. Yes, please. Who is asking? Second row? Yeah, please.

Congratulations on the declaration, sir. I just wanted to know, could you give us names of some of the countries that have signed the declaration already? Just a few. Not proper. Good evening, sir. I’m an independent journalist. I’m an independent journalist. So first, I want to know what are the outcomes from each of the seven working groups that were formed before the summit. Second, before the summit began, the Indian government focused on how India will lead the global south. How has that materialized during the summit? Has it materialized in form of bilateral conversations, any MOUs, any pacts being signed? And number three, today the SGI amendments are supposed to go into effect. We had all the big AI companies and big tech companies of the world here.

Has there been any discussion on that? Because the companies have been fairly critical, both off the record and on the record, about the compliance deadline as well as the three -year takedown window as well as some of the provenance -related specifics of the SGI amendments. Sir, Manas from the Times of India. Sir, has the objective of a technological framework been achieved? And how many countries are on board? And what is the reaction of the big tech? And there is that. And given the representation of the big tech companies, what is the government doing to ensure that we are not going to be the data and talent supplier?

Last in the second room, I think she’s about more sauce. Thank you.

Sir, Momita from PTI. I think everybody is curious to know the contours of the New Delhi Declaration. The focus and thrust, you know, rightly for India has been impact. The use cases and how it benefits the public. If you could just give us some color on what the New Delhi Declaration contours look like. Which are the areas where consensus has already been reached, where 70 countries are coming together and supporting those causes. And how would it benefit Indians?

Third room. Anybody in the third room? Okay. Please.

Momita from Outlook Business. Thank you. Yes. So I wanted to understand, recently French President mentioned about he urged India to be a part of the social media band for those under the age of 15. So has there been some sort of consensus that you reached with other countries about the same?

Anybody in third row? Okay. Please.

Hello, sir. Himanshu Desai from Rajasthan Patrika. Sir, so I wanted to ask, like, what role will…

Patrika se toh Hindi pe pushna chahiye. Mujhe bhi toh chance mile Hindi me jawab ne nahi ka.

Ji, bilkul. Sir, toh main yeh pushna chahta… Pachpang se padta ho Patrika. Sir, main yeh pushna chahta ho, jase aaj humne Dr. Mohan Yadav, Madhya Pradesh ke CM ki bhi briefing dekhi. So, matlab, like, state governments ka jo pura ka pura plan rahega, aur kaise government jo hai wo state governments ke saath mil kar kaam karegi? Like, agar hum specially…

State governments… Bawal chak. Bawal chak. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, sir. Yaku Tali from DLU Hindi. Sir, my question to you is, what is the government doing about data protection? Because we are seeing OpenAI, ChatGPT and Microsoft are taking access to all the data. Yesterday, a notification was also sent in which it was said that you can now share your contacts and then reach out to your contacts. So, don’t you think that all the Indians are taking their data?

Hello, sir. Yes, right side.

Yes, among them. Anybody else on this thing? Third row? we are working with industry on that visheshkar jo colleges aur schools mein course curriculum banna hai usme industry ke inputs lagataar aare hai bhi aur jaisi wo final hota hai wo aapke saath share bhi karenge semiconductor ka bhi industry ke saath milke kia tha telecom ka bhi industry ke saath milke kia hai to iska bhi industry ke saath milke hi karenge jaisi ki ek relevant practical useful knowledge aasake industry ke liye state governments ko bahut closely isme participate karenge kyunki ultimately janjan tak paunchne ka madhiyam rajya sarkaron ke tarike se hi ho sakta hai sarvam karib karib har benchmark pe bakiyon se kharay utra hai aur khas kar jo open AI se bhi aur deep seek se bhi aur gemini ke pro model se bhi kai benchmark pe wo better hai aap chaho to uske jo unho ne drop kia on all the globally accepted parameters.

The new regulations of SGI have been accepted and everybody has told that this is a necessity of the country and many countries in the world are already talking about bringing regulations in this direction. In fact, many countries have congratulated India and have taken the first step. And in the coming time, many more countries will watermark this. And the main purpose of this is that Is it real content or synthetic content? That transparency is necessary so that you can decide for yourself whether to trust it or not. The second thing is also very important for us to know that the SGI has been accepted by the world. that the law and constitution in the society that is illegal, is also illegal in the online world.

What is illegal in the physical world is also illegal in the online world. It is a very natural constitutional mandate. So I didn’t get anyone who opposed it. If you get someone, then do reach me. The techno -legal framework is growing very fast. I have already given a statement on children’s protection. The data protection framework is very strong. In fact, I don’t want to take names, but three countries have said that they want to make their data protection framework equal to India’s data protection framework. Already, in today’s and tomorrow’s meetings, Aaj kal aur parso 3 din ki meeting mo Already 3 desho ne kaha ki Aapka template bahut achcha hai Isi tare ke kanun ko am bhi banana chahi Mythbusters ki baad Training ke saath hi chudegi Taaki kis tare se Koi bhi point ho, uska benefit kya se Abhi chalain Fourth row Left side se Anybody in fourth row Please

Namaskar, main Sandeep ho Prabhat Khabar Jharkhand se Jis tarike se AI ko lekar Shor mach raha hai Usme Sabse jada train karne ke Zorat bachcho ko hai aaj ke daur me To kya kisi tarah ka koi module Ye course start kiya jayega Schoolo me ki saath saal Aat saal, das saal ke bachcho ko AI ki training di jayega Is tarah ki koi yojana hai Koi Koi Planning hai

Next Aage Next

Thank you, sir. Arundeep from The Hindu. So just one question. You’ve had the opportunity to interact with a lot of leaders in AI and world leaders on a range of subjects. Does the government of India, after this event, believe that AGI is coming in the next two years? What is the government’s position on that, clearly? And if so, are we prepared for that as a country? And I lied, I have another question. Second question is, the next summit is going to be held in Switzerland. But given the response to this edition, is this something that we might do again in the coming future?

Okay. Ajay.

Sir, the question is, what India has done in the UBI, what we have done in the UBI, democratization waha par kya? Kya hum koshish karenge AI mein? Aur is democratization ke is open source model ko puri duniya ne kis tarah se liya hai? Wo hum samajhna chahin. Thank you, sir.

Fourth row, anybody else? Highest, please.

Hi, good evening, sir. Ashmit from CNBC TV18. Firstly, congratulations on the largest ever AI summit. I had two questions, sir. Amongst the companies that were here, there were also the likes of NVIDIA, AMD. One concern, India is going for a data center build -out, as was evident from the large commitments that we’ve seen. The cost of compute, the cost of chips is something that constantly kept coming up in the conversations. Has that been discussed? And are there any material assurances, gains for India under the PAC silica arrangement? That’s one. Second, you spoke earlier about diffusion. I just want to get a little clarity as a part of the mission 2 .0 that you made a reference to.

A lot of these applications for AI for social purposes are the ROI may not be immediately available for the developer. In such a case, is the government willing to step in under Mission 2 .0 under some form of support or viability gap funding? Okay. Can I ask? Okay, I’m Surabhi from the Economic Times, sir. Two questions. One is I wanted to understand from you that when we launched the first version of the India AI mission from that time to now, I think a lot has changed in the AI ecosystem. So what are going to be the main focus areas of the next phase of the AI mission? Secondly, I know you want to talk about the declaration tomorrow and not today, but I wanted to understand that you’ve had meetings with the biggest names of AI as far as AI leaders are concerned.

What are some of the things, discussion points that have come up? What have been some of the asks that they have made to you and you have made to them as far as their contributions to India are concerned?

Mr. Roshan, no matter how many questions you ask, once you have answered them, fifth row, anybody? It’s less than two minutes.

Good evening, Mr. Minister. This is Arunodai Mukherjee from the BBC. I just wanted to understand and draw your attention to the U .S. delegation, which was here earlier today. They have very strongly rejected calls for global governance in AI. I wanted your response to that. And doesn’t that go against… what this entire summit was all about, charting a path which is a unified path towards global governance. How would you respond to that?

Yes. Thanks. Amrit Pal.

Minister, this is Amrit Pal from DD India. The IMF chief today said that while AI could lift global growth by a percentage point and help India achieve… What is… How is the government preparing to deal with that? My question to you is, in the face of rising deep fakes and sophisticated artificial intelligence misleading information, how does the government ensure the accountability without touching ease for doing the business for startups?

Backside. Brahma Prakash. Brahma Prakash, the way Zee News say. Thank you. Next. Yes, please.

So my question is related to the declaration. I do understand that you want to talk about it tomorrow, but if you could throw some light on whether there is some sort of consensus on demarking high -risk AI, or will that be left to national governments to decide and demark it? Thank you.

Yes, please, on the left side. Please pass on.

Sir, my question is in regards to the Global South. Since this was the first summit to be held in a Global South country, we saw significant representation. Africa, there was an Africa air village. So my question is, can we see, you know, Global South priorities in terms of how AI should be developed? Will they be reflected in the joint statement? And what, according to you, are the major takeaways for the broader Global South? And since Prime Minister Modi also, you know, he championed the inclusion of African Union during the G20 summit. Thank you.

Anyone else? Yes, please. Back side, one person is left.

Hi, sir. Jatin Grover from Mint. A couple of questions. I wanted to understand any discussions with the participating nations, maybe to create a G20 -like group, so that help us creating some sort of a binding agreements with the nations on the AI declarations. that’s one and till a few minutes back at the ATL conference you talked about having a legal framework to address the cyber crime basically arising from AI can you please elaborate more on that what kind of legal framework the government is looking at thank you

anybody else wants question otherwise we are closing ok ok

hi sir from the economic times this is about the 12 foundation models that the India AI mission is backing we launched 3 of them do you have visibility on when the rest of the 9 will be launched and also have you finalized the terms of the agreements with these companies on how much the government of India will be getting in terms of equity etc

last question at the back side

good evening sir I am Shreyas Bharadwaj from IIM Indore and IIT Indore I am an independent journalist but also a student of masterclasses of science and data science and management thank you for letting me speak so my question would be very open to any questions what has the government learnt in two aspects one, itte bade viman ko chalane ke liye bohat kuch challenges aayonge AI impact summit 2026 se government ne sapse zyada kya learning sikiye as a learner as a lifelong learner number two, tech me government ne sapse badi sikya liye is poore summit se that’s my question, thank you sir

ok, thank you very much UPSC me se kam the questions ma sabse pehle packed silica lunga that’s very important because see we are trying to create the complete ecosystem develop the complete ecosystem of semiconductor industry in our country to get the ecosystem it’s very important that all the major players, the major countries where the ecosystem currently resides should also support and encourage our journey That’s why it’s very, very important that we had the packed silica sign today. From all the discussions that we had, it very clearly emerged that the world looks at India as clearly a trusted partner for semiconductor supply chain, which means the way semiconductor industry will grow in our country in the coming years, that looks like a very important, it will emerge as a major sector.

It’s a very important sector that is very visible. Very clearly, it was evident from the discussions. Same thing will apply to… Do you know in 2026, the highest -paid people in industry are not MBAs or fancy degree holders. They are agentic… By now, I recall two meetings in which people are looking at reducing, power consumption at least 50%. and reducing cost significantly. Sometimes even some people even said that a fraction of the cost of the current chips. So that kind of innovation is happening. And India will be a big beneficiary of that innovation because we are starting our design and semiconductor journey at a point where we can use all the benefits that we know about AI and optimize our design of chips according to the new age.

We are not bound by the legacy of the past. We can actually make a new beginning, which is what we have challenged our startups in the Semicon 2 .0 where we want to have a series of deep tech startups designing chips. I’ve spoken about the next steps. I’ve spoken about education, democratization, diffusion, ROI. Yes, I believe that ROI will come from the application. Most of the enterprise… use cases which are visible here in large number. I think I read one story from one of the digital versions of one of the big channels where this point was also very clearly brought out that while people are mostly focusing on the consumer facing applications but the large number of enterprise solution providers who are participating in this exhibition, that’s very important both from the jobs perspective, from the IT industry’s health perspective and from the direction that India will be taking as a major player in the AI world going forward.

Yes, we have a comprehensive plan. Every sector, as we have maintained right from day one, every sector will be benefited by this. On cyber security, so many sessions have happened. We just inaugurated one research institute between Zscaler and Airtel, and many more such initiatives are going to happen in the coming time frame. The declaration will, when the text comes out, you’ll be able to see the contours of the declaration. Global South, of course, participated in large numbers and very interested in collaborating with us, and that level of trust is there. When the next models will be launched, we’ll keep sharing with you as we progress on that. We had committed one, we have done three.

So it’s like a good, it’s a journey which we’ll keep sharing with you. Learnings, many. One was very surprising learnings that when so many good things are happening, how one small thing can be highlighted so much, it’s a personal learning for me. It was also a learning for me that… It’s a learning for me. people who are in politics, they don’t even, some of the people are opposition, they don’t even understand what the youth today wants and they try to create things which really, I mean, it’s really sad in a way and funny in another way and unko kaun samja sakta hai, I don’t know. Many learnings are there. Here, we’ll use these learnings to improve all the future and this was a very large scale.

As I said, already five lakh plus visitors have already, we were just doing the estimate, I think actual number is about six, but we are just being very conservative, everything which is measured is what we would like to share with you. That kind of participation is there and in the end, I’d like to request MEA to because they have been very important partner for us. your role has been stellar. Delhi Police also I would like to thank. All the security participants who were present throughout this and all the friends of media, you played a very constructive role. A big round of applause for the media. Thank you, friends. Kandeer.

Thank you, sir. It has been a pleasure for us in the Ministry of External Affairs to work along with METI as Team India to put our best foot forward for the world. This event has been a success, may I say a grand success. We have heard world leaders who are here. We had 20 world leaders who attended this AI summit. In addition, we had 45 delegations represented at ministerial level from across the world. We also had 100 countries represented. Thank you.

about this morning is right -signing governance for an AI -driven world. So what we’ll try to do with a pretty excellent panel, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is talk a bit about shared computes and data initiatives that hopefully give all nations access to AI resources. We’ll look a bit at how to up -level the playing field for smaller and developing nations. And we’ll talk about collaboration in key sectors like healthcare and education and climate resilience. I’ve got a perfect panel to do that with. I’m going to introduce them all first, and then we’ll dive straight into the conversation. So unfortunately, Navreena Singh from Credo AI couldn’t be with us this morning. She’s got a meeting with the president, so she’s excused.

But we do have… What I start with, just next to me here, Bella Wilkinson, who’s a research fellow on the Digital Society Program. with the Chatham House. Next to her is Rafik Rikorian. I hope I’ve pronounced that vaguely okay, who is the Chief Technology Officer for Mozilla. Next to him, we’ve got Rajesh Nambia, who is the President of NASCOM, our sister association here in India. And last but not least, we’ve got Halak Shirastava, managed, who’s Global AI and Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Cohere. And for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Sabina Chofu, I’m International Policy and Strategy Lead at TechUK. So we are the sister association of NASCOM back in the UK.

So without further ado, we will start with setting a bit of a global context, and who better to do that than Isabella. So from a kind of geopolitical perspective, how realistic, I guess, is alignment on AI governance across countries with… fair to say very different strategic interests right now. And where do you see maybe multilateral institutions? I know multilateralism is not a very popular theme these days, but where do you see multilateral institutions or maybe other international players playing a role in this space? So over to you.

Thank you, Sabina. Thanks to my fellow speakers. It’s great to be here today, really keeping the energy up on the final day of the summit. We can all do it. Let me answer your question directly and then perhaps elaborate a little bit more in detail. Global consensus on how to govern AI is a no -go. It is not going to happen in this geopolitical environment. However, partial alignment on priority issue areas is possible, and it’s pragmatic to throw our weight behind these smaller gatherings that we can then scale using the multilateral format. Now, let’s take a second. Let’s take a second to sketch out the state of play. We have some great experts in the room, on the panel, so I won’t spend too long doing this.

We have been absolutely covered in really optimistic summit rhetoric, walking into Bharat Mandapam, going to side events over the course of this week. But despite the optimism outside of these walls in the background, the US -China AI race continues to accelerate to the umpteenth degree. The capabilities of advanced and the most frontier AI systems and models, the little we know about their capabilities, mind, with huge gaps in transparency, continue to advance. And global scientists only recently have issued warnings about the state of the science and the intense uncertainty surrounding these capabilities and the impact they might be having on our communities and societies. well it’s a good thing we have strong international institutions and shared values we don’t you know it’s a really difficult time for global cooperation outside of ai you know we’re seeing i would argue since the second world war an unprecedented degradation of the international organizations the shared values the rule of law that we have all held so dearly so suffice to say it’s a difficult time for global governance it’s difficult time for the global governance of ai now institutions in the past have very much been brokers mediators and scalers of consensus on tricky governance issues and some of the governance problems we’re facing today are pretty old right i mean i’ve encountered them in previous roles at chatham house and other areas of tech i’m sure the experts on our panel have come across them and the core governance puzzle that we need to figure out is this taking into account the state of geopolitics, the uncertainty around the state of the science, the market dynamics mediated by these leading labs and intensely, intensely competitive US and Chinese ARS dynamics, how on earth do we bring rivals and competitors around the same table?

How do we bring states with a nominal or a minimal alignment of interests and incentives into the same room? Now, you started by asking me about multilateralism and institutions, but maybe let’s reframe this and talk about coalitions. In other areas of governance, what we’ve seen is intense coalition building in crisis or unstable settings around a trusted mechanism, a trusted approach, perhaps in the absence of shared values and principles. And what I’m really interested in, in the context of AI, is where coalition building can develop trust around a credible governance approach, adopt a state champion, get support from associations, from builders, from leading labs themselves, and then scale it using the multilateral format. And over the past few days, I’ve been really excited by some of this splintering to scale dynamics that I’ve seen maybe in conversations on verification, on -chip hardware, risk mitigation strategies, even anonymized collection of usage data, which came out of the commitments yesterday.

Now, what’s the messaging that can drive this coalition building in the absence of trusted institutions, in the absence of shared values? I’ll get into this later in my remarks, but I think it has to be sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Resource -constrained countries. who might decide to adopt a common data governance approach, who might decide to pool resources like compute, have to also consider a degree of governance alignment, again, at this low -hanging fruit, in order to not only withstand the dynamics of the AI race, but to ensure that the collective benefits of cooperation and governance alignment massively outweigh anything they could do individually. So I think I’ll leave it there. Slightly pessimistic take. Let’s see if there’s some more optimism on the

Thank you so much, Bella. I don’t think it was that pessimistic. You did kind of, I think you made it sound very pragmatic in terms of, look, the world is not what we want it to be, and there isn’t the level of multilateral cooperation that we maybe used to have. But you have talked about coalition building, and it’s probably the best we can hope for in the world as it is, as opposed to the world as we’d like it right now. And Rajesh, can I turn to you next? For emergence. economy, obviously access to compute data and infrastructure are critical, but what do you see as some of the barriers most pressing, but also maybe opportunities for AI adoption in India and beyond?

Over to you.

First of all, thank you for having me on the panel. Pleased to be with all of you and then a few of you showed up here as well, so thank you for coming up. We wish this was the Modi inauguration last evening, very a little bit more than this crowd, but nevertheless, we’ll do with this. But you know, I believe we used to talk about digital divide for a long period of time, and I think while that had its own puts and takes, when you compare a smaller economy and smaller country with a larger one and so on, I think the AI divide is going to be much, much bigger than the digital divide which we saw, because the biggest difference is that at least in the digital divide, the you know access and so on whereas this is all about agency and then it can completely put you at a different back foot so it is such an important topic to talk about when you talk about the broader you know haves and have nots and what really goes on with the larger smaller economies and so on and I truly believe that the accessibility when you look at the broader scales it will come across multiple things starting with compute one of the largest you know piece of what we are talking about here right I think as you mentioned in terms of the race between the US and China and so on and so forth but if you leave those two countries then of course we have a big drop in terms of where the real access is going to be and I believe totally that you know the continued limited access to the broader compute facility is going to be undue putting some of these smaller countries, especially the developing ones, into a little bit of a disadvantage.

So, I think there’s a lot that can be done around it in terms of saying, you know, what is that, you know, countries can potentially do in terms of pooling and so on. But I think there is certainly an issue when it comes to compute. And, you know, not just in terms of accessibility, but also in terms of expense and so on, because at the end of the day, all of these are, even if you use the purchasing power parity, and then sort of look at what it costs for people to sort of get into the kind of level of GPUs, potentially, or GPU clusters one has to produce to even have a meaningful language model and so on.

I think that’s going to be a very different ballgame. And the second element of this whole broader issue that we’re talking about is also the data and then the organization of data, availability of data, quality of data, and so on. I think the more you get into the development, world you will find our developing world you will find that the the data itself is very siloed in many ways there are you know different state silos different department silos and so on and it gets into a point where the data which is such an important and integral part of everything to do with AI you will end up having the data which gets fed into the broader models and eventually the AI systems will necessarily not have the right representation of that population which is a huge concern I mean even especially when you you know of course India is slightly luckier in many ways in terms of us you know playing that game a little bit you know punching a little bit above our weight in some sense but but when you when you go down on the on the list of countries which do not have access to all of these I think you’re going to find it even even harder in terms of solving the data issue and the data availability data quality all of that this becomes a bigger issue and there when we talked about infrastructure gap compute gap it’s a little bit more than just the pure compute itself gpus and so on but it’s also about connectivity power uh these are the issues which uh you know we somehow take it for granted in other segments but i think you will find that power is going to be a huge uh foundation for all of that and as you know that there are multiple layers in in building any of the ai systems and one of the uh bottom most layer is going to be power and then you know what really happens to the power and if it has to be clean power then you know does it put additional tax on the on the developing world for for making sure that that power comes out clean connectivity is a huge issue even though it’s kind of broadly solved in in some sense with all the um satellite options and so on but we continue to have the kind of connectivity you need to run a truly inclusive ai system is going to be very different from those uh you know people have thought otherwise and then of course we can go on and on in terms of the the other layers of the power and then of course we can go on and on issue, the availability of skills and ensuring that you have the right skills not just to leverage AI but also to build AI, I mean there are two different type of capabilities that you need to produce in any country so these are the issues and how do you make sure that you have a broader the opportunity itself would be to sort of look at this and say are there other ways of collaborating other ways of partnering and so on, because you know these especially when you go down the line, list of countries we have close to 200 countries or so in the world and when you leave the top 5 or 10 and then you go below and then you keep going down the list, it becomes harder I mean I don’t think that everybody is going to be producing a full blown, large language model and things that they need to sort of do it for themselves at that point in time the question will be can you really partner, can you really leverage some of the common systems that can be done across these countries and so on and so on

Thank you. I mean, you’ve done a brilliant job of putting all the free problems we’ve got and then saying you’ve got a long list afterwards in terms of cooperation. But I love the touch of optimism there at the end. It’s like, you know, if you lift a country out of the room, you still have a hundred and whatever, 85 that need to figure it out. So I liked a lot of that framing. And thanks for touching on

I mean, unsurprisingly, being someone from Mozilla, I’ll probably go with the open source angle as one of the opportunities to actually align the talent, align the capabilities, and actually do shared infrastructure. I mean, maybe I’ll draw two analogies to think about, and then we can go more deep into those as it applies to AI. But for all practical purposes, every computer on the planet runs Linux. There are a few iPhones here and there on top of it. But the Linux model, I think, is a good one for all of us to think about, that every computer… Every country, every nation in the world, almost every company in the world, contributes to the single code base which has been deployed across these billions of computing devices across the planet.

And there are lots of derivative work that happens from it. So like a company like Google can then take that and make it into Android. A company like a vending machine company can deploy Linux onto a Raspberry Pi and run inside their vending machine. So I think there’s an analogy here of being able to use shared infrastructure, shared software infrastructure as a collaboration mechanism that we can all pool resources together but still have sovereignty on top of it. So we can still all be contributing to this common core but then fine -tune our way to our own particular implementations. And I think that if we take that and then marry it with a web analogy of in the early 90s of the original web, you needed to ask for permission in order to deploy a website.

And by permission I mean effectively you had to go buy yourself a Solaris box and then you had to go buy yourself you had to buy yourself a Windows NT. server, you’re trying to configure an ActiveX scenario. And the beauty of what Mozilla and Firefox did, we’re not the only ones who did it, but the beauty of what they did there is a forced openness throughout the stack that enabled anyone without permission to build whatever they wanted. And I think we need to find a similar moment. So in that world, we went from the Windows NT stack and all of IIS to the LAMP stack. And the LAMP stack has these gorgeous analogies of just like anyone can build on Linux.

When Facebook needed PHP to move faster, they did massive improvements on PHP, which then trickled down to all of us. So people can contribute in different ways across it. That’s not the world we’re currently living in AI. We’re living in this world where there are a few frontier model companies that are effectively doing governance for all of us in some way, shape, or form. And I agree with my colleague that that’s an untenable situation. I do live in San Francisco, but you don’t want four people in San Francisco. government’s decisions for the entire world that doesn’t make a lot of sense. So I do think if we can find the LAMP stack equivalent model for AI, and this is actually what I’ve turned all of Mozilla towards, of just like how do we define open standards, how do we define open interfaces so that the vibrancy of the open source community can come together and actually build solutions that work for every single person, every single community, every single government on the planet.

You can sort of build upon, you can contribute to the common base, but then build upon it and take it in a way that makes it more aligned with your country’s values or your company’s values or your individual values, and you can fine -tune your solution out of that. So I think there is an analogy here around how open source could actually provide digital sovereignty across all the different levels. Give us agency as a person, give opportunities for flexibility at a corporation level, and then give. Give countries the ability to own their version of the stack. That could actually be quite beautiful if we can actually figure out how to do that in an appropriate way.

I tried to give you a dose of optimism you have given me a dose of optimism but I’m absolutely shocked you talked about open source thanks so much Ralphie and I did appreciate you brought up the standards because I’m going to talk to Halak and we’re going to go a bit into collaboration and standards here so obviously with the myriad of AI governance frameworks I’m going to turn to you on the question of where do you see potential for alignment on standards maybe some interoperability some maybe risk management framework so keep us on the hopeful path please

I am here to provide the hopeful perspective let me start out by saying that I lead global public policy at Cohere. Cohere is a Canadian AI developer we build models and we have agentic AI our solution is called North so in my role I look across the global regulatory framework that means If our startup wants to, you know, do business in a certain country, I try to understand the regulatory landscape of that country, and then I advise our company if it’s favorable or not. When we’re talking about governance and frameworks that are existing, my perspective is I think it’s not there yet, but I have a more promising view of it. I think that in certain principles, we are converging to where we need to go, and there are strong opportunities.

Technical standards is one of them. You know, there are frameworks like NIST and ISO frameworks. For startups, these are key. The reason they’re key is because they’re flexible and they’re evolving. If we just go country by country, what that’s going to do is price out smaller companies. But if we have an international framework that is evolving and flexible and, you know, we’re going to be able to do that, you know, also including industry coalition, which a lot of the model developers are a part of. But also, like, other stakeholders can be a part of as well. I think it really helps. The second thing I would say is around shared practices, around risk mitigation. So I think there’s strong opportunity there as we come together and share documents or, you know, evaluations around misuse or model capabilities or impact of models.

I think, you know, like I said, we have a way to go, but we are moving closer to that. And then the third thing I would say is interoperability of shared resources. This is key, key, key. We have a big ecosystem. So, yes, there is big tech involved, but there are smaller players. And every single day there’s new startups that are wanting to emerge and wanting to have a go -to -market strategy. And the only way this is possible is if industry and all of industry, big and small, the whole ecosystem starts sharing documents and documentation around, you know, red teaming or evals or multilingual benchmarks and things like that to come to some sort of consensus.

Thanks so much. I’m really enjoying this positive vibe we’re going with. And, you know, that combination, I think it kind of links really nicely back to what Bella was saying around coalitions, you know, build on themes, right? It’s like where do we think we have common ground and what we think we can build on. So I really, really enjoyed that contribution. Rajesh, can I turn to you next? Because I did wonder what all this stuff means for, you know, in kind of smaller and developing economies. And maybe if you have any examples of shared standards, pooled resources, any of the stuff that Halak was talking about, public -private models, or anything that you’ve seen that looks promising, that looks like it could deliver.

Thank you.

You know, as we said, the moment you look at shade models, there are multiple reasons why we want to do this. And one, of course, as we’ve talked about, the cost involved in doing some of that. I think that itself is becoming cost prohibitive and hence there may not be even an option for many of the countries but to sort of have this shade model. We also find that in the regional compute consortiums that, you know, folks can potentially create and you often see examples of where, for example, a standard data set and stuff like that being shared by, not just by, you know, even within a country. It could be between government, academia, and then industry sort of sharing the same sort of data sets, making sure that they’re able to leverage that in some sense.

Compute is clearly something which continues. continues to be the, you know, we shared resources in many of the, even in India, for example, you know, our own AI mission has created this cluster where it can be broadly leveraged by both industry, academia, and the government in terms of ensuring that they’re able to get access to the right set of GPU, set of GPU, GPU forms, and ensuring that they’re able to use that and then take it forward. So, public -private sharing of data, certainly the compute consortium, and then cloud credits, I think that’s something which sovereigns have been able to work with the hyperscalers, especially in terms of getting a lot of, you know, cloud credits for the GPUs, especially, right, because, which is needed for even if you, it’s not about building a frontier model, but it’s even to leverage the frontier model, build some reasoning models on top of it, and ensuring that you’re able to build an application which is meaningful, not that every time you need a powerful GPU, but there are occasions where you definitely you would need and then hence you know using some of those cloud credits will become a big need and then of course when you switch to regulations and so on and ensuring that how do you make sure that even having a policy is something which is shared across you know you don’t want to reinvent the wheel every single time so do you have a method by which you could leverage the existing you know look at what is out there in the world and then sort of leverage it and then try to reuse it because what you don’t want is to have this 100 versions of the same thing with a few nuances here and there so that’s something which I think companies will try and create a model as well.

Thank you so much and I’m gonna kind of turn over to

Yes. Yes. Looking forward to a truth transparency and accountability -driven world. It takes 30 years for FC files to come out in a place like America, the developed world. Is that the speed of the system till it collapses and till we start a new world? Are we resigned to that fate?

Yeah, so I can’t really see the link between the Epstein files and the… 30 years since the world was destroyed by Aaron Mulder in 2001. You don’t do the truth to come out. So you don’t have the system speed. Yes. Sure. Thank you. So on… Just to kind of build on what Rajesh was saying there on kind of also the capability. So maybe if we move into a bit of cross -border cooperation and Bella, if I can maybe turn to you just to build on those points. Because obviously what we are seeing across the developing world in particular, often it’s kind of the institutional capacity that’s a bit of an issue there. Yeah. kind of doing all the engagement and all the investments and all the, you know, you kind of still run into.

What are some of the, and I saw you were taking notes furiously, so I’m sure you have reflections on what has been said so far. But also, what are some of the resources

dependencies, figure out what they want to invest in and what dependencies they’re willing to accept, wanting to build strong institutions, again, that can mainline AI directly into public service delivery, and as you said, enable cross -border cooperation, might take a step back and figure out which foreign capabilities or foreign services they’re willing to accept at some levels of the stack and where they’d like to invest in indigenous solutions. And I mentioned open source earlier because this has come up time and time again, and I’m sure it’s going to be absolutely no surprise to our audience here today. An example which has really stuck with me and Rafi, I’d be really interested in your thoughts on this, is the Southeast Asian Languages Under One Network model, so a multilingual sea lion LLM.

And this is something we’ve called, again, in a really interesting collaboration with AI Safety Asia, open models. With local adaptation, really balancing. again inputs from open source models potentially provided by foreign providers with adaptation to a local context and so i think leaving the summit what i’m really going to be interested in is i think this connection between drawing on i guess inputs from the open source community fine -tuning and locally adapting their contributions and then perhaps doing so not only in the service of again strong robust institutions at the national level who are ai ready but also on this kind of collective cross -border level i hope that makes sense

it does and i’m gonna let rafi kind of uh fit into that as well because you’ve uh you’ve uh segwayed really nicely into into his uh part but also um if you can also touch upon feel free to react to what uh bella has said but also if you can also touch upon on on the what you’ve seen as best practice in international and cross -border collaboration maybe in healthcare climate resilience audience education anywhere you’ve seen good stories to tell please do share

i mean i do think a lot about the local fine -tuning and i think that that’s actually a really powerful concept of like we can all contribute to a core and then locally fine -tune for our values and our needs and i think that this has shown up in a bunch of different ways and i’m interested personally in all these alternative i don’t even want to call it our alternative but like other architectures that enable this to be possible because in some ways we’re kind of being being fed a regime that says it’s not possible but i think like architecturally it actually is in a bunch of different ways so i love the indigenous data model like looking at what different indigenous peoples have done around data collectives for their local areas so there’s a group of people for example in hawaii that is doing this for their genomic data because genomic data is really useful for pharmaceutical models and so like they’ve been looking for ways so that they can both monetize but also the provenance of their data as it goes through these pharmaceutical models.

So there are some professors out of UCSD starting to build actually what these data trusts could look like for Hawaiian people, and I think that that model could be replicated in lots of different parts of the world. Mozilla is actually attempting to do a bunch of this. So we’re creating something that we call the Mozilla Data Collaborative, or Collective, sorry. And what the Collective is meant to be is it’s meant to be a marketplace of ethically sourced but provenance -traced data sets so that you can bring your data. It will actually help you scrub it, clean it, et cetera, and also make sure you have the appropriate licenses on it so that people can come find the data sets that they want to train their models but make sure that attribution is given, compensation is given, et cetera.

So we’re literally in conversations with almost every radio station on the planet to try to get their recordings and their transcripts onto the marketplace, not for Mozilla to make money. In fact, we actually want the radio stations. to have a monetization path for all the data that they’re sitting on. simply have it scraped by big model providers to try to soak that into their systems. Instead, require that it be licensed, require that compensation be given. So I think there are models there. And on the computational side, I think there’s also a lot of interesting things showing up around federated learning opportunities. For those of you who don’t know what federated learning is, think of, you know, Google did this very famously when they trained their handwriting model across everyone’s Android phones.

So your handwriting is very personal and private. Your handwriting is on your device. And Google is able to train a handwriting recognition model that didn’t require them to get access to your data, because part of the training happened on your phone, and then the model wait through shipped it back up for centralized training. And I think something like that actually could be an interesting model for international collaboration of like, I can bring my data to the game, my healthcare data, my values data, my language data, but not have to release it to a different company, or sorry, a different country. Instead, allow you to do it in a different way. And I think that’s a really interesting model.

Thank you. of the training on my compute, on my infrastructure, and only ship model weights back up, and actually then create bigger models across borders and across geographies that could actually take into account different healthcare scenarios, different value systems, et cetera, in there. So I think that there are these interesting alternative architectures that we can actually start leaning into, these data trust models, these federated learning models, that actually could be massive enablers for cooperation and allow us to build these foundational things that we can then fine -tune and bring to our local context.

Thanks so much, Rafi. That fine -tuning seems to be definitely a thing in this conversation, how you kind of built for different cultures and countries. And Halak, maybe I can come to you next, because we keep talking about kind of international cooperation and coordination. But I’m wondering, how do you translate that? played that, you know, chit -chat into actual skills, capacity, capability for emerging economies. And, you know, I mean, we are in a very international AI Impact Summit. So, you know, kind of how do we bring that from we talk about governance to all this international policy actually delivering for emerging economies?

It’s a good question. I think let me start out by saying capacity building isn’t just, you know, running workshops or basically talking to regulators about, you know, this should be done. What it is is capacity building, I think, for emerging economies especially is critical because – hold on. Let me think. Okay, so emerging economies have unequal access to data, information, and technology, right? So what are we trying to solve for here in terms of capacity building? The first thing I would say is shared evidence. So what we need is we need players to help into this capacity building system with documents, results, performance, benchmarks, to lift up other players. That, I think, would be number one.

The second thing I think is key and sometimes overlooked is the value of, like, procurement policies. And I agree with Isabella. What if we had, like, an industry coalition, like a cross -border network, where they’re solving for procurement policies or procurement rules? And what this does is this brings in global players. So now what you’re doing is you’re opening up your country to different markets. The next thing I would say is, like, you know, a lot of – Let me think. Let me put it this way. So there are developers who develop the technology, and then there are deployers. They buy the technology, and they use it. So, for example, like a public sector agency. Why is it so – Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you you Thank you. Thank you. economist Frank Nagel has a report recently that approximately 24 billion U .S. dollars are being wasted by not switching to open source models right now. So the economics are starting to make a lot of sense. So I think once all these stars align, it becomes almost obvious what an answer could look like for local governments around open source AI models, et cetera. So I’m really excited for that in the next 12 to 18 months.

Thank you. Rajesh?

No, I agree with both of what’s been said so far, but I also want to give a sense of I think it’s when you look at AI governance and people tend to sort of lead with regulatory regulation first. I believe that countries and especially the countries which we talked about in terms of more from an inclusion point of view, you’ve got to lead with innovation first mindset because I think regulation is required and certainly needed, but I think innovation is probably needed more in some sense. And also when you look at the AI governance, governance across all of that. we do while there could be horizontal governance which will apply to every AI systems I think the more meaningful governance that you’re going to find when you get into sectoral governance meaning when you look at the AI systems for health care and you’ll find there are the understanding of a harm in the health care segment is very different from financial services and so on so how do you get into those sectoral areas then you can have meaningful governance structure and last but not the least you need to have the right talent and people who can actually who understand all of this in both in public sector and people who are supposedly governing all of this that is something which is it’s not the talent in terms of broader AI model building and people who are building AI systems but how do you make sure that the talent in the governance space in the governments and people who are actually regulating it they don’t understand the real harm and then it’s going to be a bigger issue and especially when it comes to the you know the list of countries that we talked about always when you get deeper down the list you will find that the talent is going to be here and there and you will find that the talent is going to be here and there and you will find that be here and there and you will find that the talent is going to be here and there and you will find that the talent is going to be here and there and you will find that the talent issue in terms of understanding.

Thank you. And, you know, as someone who lives in Brussels, I’ll make sure to take that message back. Halak.

Okay, so what am I most excited about, I guess, in the next 12 months? I mean, in the last few days, you’ve seen companies really, really excited about AI, but what you’ve also seen is countries very excited about AI. So what does this mean in governance? It means that the community and the participation is only going to increase. I don’t see it going backwards. And so, as technology is evolving, more players are going to have a voice in the system, and the standards and the ITU bodies or the ISO bodies, and I think because of this convergence, we are going to, as society, just, like, increase our, like, literacy of not only AI, but technology, but also bring it into whatever we’re in, if we’re in the private sector, if we’re in the public sector.

And because of that, I think we’re going to have to Yeah, I think a lot of progress will be made in the next 12 months, and you’ll see it as it converges.

Thank you so much. Thanks to all the panel. Thanks for being here, and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you.

All of us here, we would have visited doctors at some point in time or have been sick. Anyone who has never visited a doctor, please raise hand. So practically everyone. So let’s imagine how was your experience when you visit a doctor? How do you express your symptoms? How the doctor interacts with you and how the interaction happens with the medical systems where EMRs comes in? What we are trying to show today and what we’ve built at EkaCare is an end -to -end solution that solves three key challenges that we face today. One is the fragmentation of information and clear delivery, be it right from taking an appointment or taking a vitals. The second is how easily and comfortably you can tell about your history rather than fumbling through lots of files and how easily it can be collected, collated and being.

And the last but not the least. we would want doctors to spend time with us and not with machines writing about prescriptions, rather talking to us, counseling us, connecting with us. So the solution that we have built solves for all these three challenges. Obviously, thanks to the advancement in AI, we have been able to do a lot of this due to the capabilities that we have built in -house. So I’m going to narrate a story. This story is of Neeti. She’s a 65 -year -old female, has diabetes, and she wants to now see how she can do the whole end -to -end care delivery. To start off, Neeti is quite digital savvy. She actually has created her ABHA address.

ABHA is the digital identity that India government provides. This digital identity allowed her to collect a lot of her medical records. records into the app, which is her PHR or patient health record app. She has also taken many photographs so that the AI can read through these photographs and collects her medical history in a digital format so that it can be summarized. Now what happens is Neeti wants to talk to an AI, which is a med assist or an assistant for Neeti. She goes ahead, she just picks up a prompt, says summarize my health. What is happening now is all of Neeti’s health is getting summarized. You would know, Neeti would know these are the kind of things that has come up from the medical records.

Also, there is a prompt that Neeti would get, which is very, very relevant to the kind of things that Neeti is supposed to talk about. But today Neeti came for a very different purpose. And now in a local language, she’s talking to the bot. And she’s talking to Neeti. And Neeti is actually telling that In English, she’s expressing that she has fever and there is a wound in her foot. What AI would start doing now is try to understand more about this specific condition. Where is the wound? Is it swelled? Are there any kind of smell that is coming in? And all of this is happening in the local language that Neeti understands. More importantly, it is not letting Neeti to only type or talk.

There are these prompts that are coming in that will ease off the interaction of a 65 -year -old female. After collecting more information, such as mobile number, the AI would identify that this is an important case and this needs a doctor’s intervention. But which doctor’s intervention? With which clinic? On which day? All of this information will now get collected. This will be displayed. So in this case, Neeti is being told that there is an availability of these two doctors on 14th of February. But she can always say that, okay, I want to do it in a different day. Pick up the doctor. As soon as she picks up the doctor, the appointments gets created. Neeti can actually do all of this by typing or by acting on the prompts as well.

So this is how all the information that Neeti wanted to share with the doctor gets collected, gets summarized, and now appointment is created. The next story goes to when Neeti visits the doctor’s clinic. And when Neeti visits the doctor’s clinic, this is the doctor’s view where a doctor is looking at a classical EMR screen. but how this EMR screen is fitted with these AI utilities that can help a doctor to get the better outcome is what we want to demonstrate. If you see all the current EMR and the current prescription for Neeti is completely empty. There is nothing there. Doctor is looking at the past history of Neeti as well as what are the current ailments and current issues that has been listed.

AI also ensured that it not only figures out the important information for patient, but here a doctor is also able to understand and get to know more about Neeti that there is an uncontrolled diabetes. So this is the kind of person that he’s dealing with. But more importantly, it would be very hard for a doctor to start filling all of these information. During the consultation, doctor just starts the audio -based EkaScribe, which is now doing the interaction between doctor and the patient, recording the interaction between doctor and the patient. These interactions gets converted into medical notes and these medical notes are verifiable medical notes that doctors would see. Again, this entire thing has come out just by the interaction between the doctor and the patient.

Doctor has to just do copy to EMR pad. As soon as the copy to EMR pad happens, this entire information gets filled, whatever has been discussed, all the medication that doctors wanted to do. But here we go and see that during the consultation, doctor prescribed amoxicillin. But the patient’s medical history said that he is or she is allergic to amoxicillin. The capable AI -based EMR is now alerting that the patient is allergic to amoxicillin. So, the patient is allergic to amoxicillin. So, the patient is allergic to it. without actually going deeper, a doctor can very easily go ahead now and change this medication to provide for a better outcome as well as to reduce the medical errors.

So it’s changed from amoxicillin to clindamycin. As it changed, the prompt also changed. If you look at the information, all filled, the PDF view of the patient will have the entire medications, everything created in the local language. There is a translation of all the remarks, advices, everything in the language that patient understands. And at the click of a button, this information goes and sits into the patient’s PHR app, creating another node into her medical system. That can be used for the further consultation and any kind of other ailments. So that’s what is the power of AI and the utilities that we are seeing today. The care process right from being fragmented to being consolidated, understanding the patient’s entire medical history to making sure that the doctor’s time is saved while he’s seeing more patients and more medical data is captured.

Today, all of that is possible. But yes, there are challenges. How to build these things at scale for multiple languages, how to generate that data so that your models are verifiable at those large scale. Who is evaluating these capabilities that are being built? All of these are challenges that we as a developer space. And I’m looking forward to building more and working more in this domain.

I’ll ask you to take a seat. When you said, is there anyone who has not visited a doctor, instinctively I was asking, does veterinary doctor count? Because I’m a veterinarian by background. And then it’s only a half joke, actually. In the pet care industry, there is real value and business to be made there. So just a thought. And on a more serious note, you could change the name of the lady and adjust age, et cetera. That could be my mother. And I deal with this personally as a caregiver, has all these conditions, deal with so many papers. And every interface you mentioned is a leaf out of my personal life. So thank you for thinking about building a solution here.

I will invite my. Panelists one by one, please join us in the on the stage. First, Dr. Richard Rukwata. He is the chief regulator. He is the director general of Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe. I have very high regard for regulators because I have been working on our regulatory agency and the streamlining, and I can see how difficult job that is. And the fact that you have seen this through for ML3 recognition, that’s a wonderful accomplishment. Congratulations. Congratulations on that. Not an easy job. And also, you are involved in the regulatory harmonization work of Africa, and there is a lot of interesting thoughts you will be hopefully able to share on Next, I would like to invite Professor Charlotte Watts.

Last we saw was in G20. Hopefully, it brings back memories. Yes. Happy ones. I’d like to keep it that way. She has had extensive career in both health care, HIV, gender -based violence, epidemiology, mathematics, and a deep experience working in the government, UK government, which was the capacity she came for G20 meetings, which I was involved in from India side. So it’s a pleasure to have you back, Charlotte. And now she’s working at Wellcome Trust as Executive Director of Solutions. I would love to hear more about how you are thinking about these things. And next I would like to invite Dr. Monica Sharma. I happened to meet her just now, and she is the lead for No One Artists India Foundation.

And welcome. And… And her background is also in this both biomedical field, science innovation field, but also has extensive experience working in putting together funding programs, whether it is Newton Fund, whether it is IRTG, Germany’s International Research Training Groups, or India’s BioPharma Mission Program. So all of these, I’m sure, will come in very handy in your current role and would love to hear from you on thoughts related to the topic today. And last but not least, my dear friend and mentor, Dr. Trevor Mundell. I should say Dr. Dr. Trevor Mundell. He is both a – he has an unusual background. People who work with him smile when I say unusual. And Trevor, he did medical degree and then he figured he wanted a Ph .D.

in mathematics. So and is a Rhodes Scholar and has extensive experience in pharmaceutical industry as from early research to development and decade plus experience in global health. With that, we will get started. First to begin with, so I think hopefully you all have mics. For me personally, coming here after having read the blog that went out very famously by CEO of Anthropic, I came in with a very bleak feeling, to be very honest. It’s. Kind of depressing. what are we creating but I have to say last two three days has been energizing seeing all the chaos in terms of interactions people talking to each other hustle just hustle and people excited about the product they are building it brought me memories of vegetable market where I grew up from where people are like life there right so people are trying to sell something people are trying to buy something people are talking and the reason I talk about that as a happy thing is it’s nice to see so many human beings that’s what came to my mind in this in the backdrop of that blog so just love to hear from you what was your feeling as human beings I think this this seeing anything that you want to particularly share last two three days You have been here.

You saw all of this. What did that make you feel? Because I think going forward, this feeling of human beings, I think, will have a currency of its own. Anybody wants to volunteer and say something? An open ended question.

Yes, I’m happy to jump in. So I just got here actually yesterday. So I actually missed, I think, the early start of the week, which I heard was fantastic because you had the youth here. As well as, you know, older people who’ve been in the global health or the global sort of sphere or in the AI world for longer. So that that mix and the drive of the kind of energy, I think, is what I was hearing people tell me about the start of the week. But now I’ve just been here. Yeah. Sort of last night and today. And for me, what I feel quite reassured about, I wonder if it’s so, you know, the change.

is so profound and so I suppose it I was sort of wary because there’s so much hype um and then clearly the risks are being articulated but what I feel reassured about in going to a number of sessions is just actually we’re starting to have the more meaningful conversations about what this really means that is getting beyond that either hyper cell or hyper fear to actually how do we navigate this space and also how do we navigate this as a global community because this is not something that’s one country’s problem to fix so so actually I’m feeling that you know this is this is a really important conference and and we’re starting to get into the we need and we’re starting to get into the nitty -gritty of of how on earth we move forward in in the in the best way that really

Anybody else want to share? Trevor and then Monica.

Well, Sundara, you know, what I’ve heard frequently in this meeting, and I hear it quite often in the AI application space, is that technology is just 10 % of the exercise in applications of AI. And the rest is really around people and ecosystems. And as soon as people say that, they then go back to talk about technology. So, I am interested in how we do more than just pay lip service to this notion that we really need to think about the ecosystem and the people involved, probably more than the technology itself. And defining the actual role for humans in the loop is going to be, I think, you know, as important as any of the technological advances.

So, Sundara, I don’t have an experience from the summit as such, because I’ve just arrived here. But I want to share a very relevant experience from this model. morning so while i was coming here i have a six and a half years old who just saw ai on my you know computer and he said where are you going i said yeah i have a meeting to attend he said ai and i was like oh he’s able to see i said so you know what is here he said yeah it’s artificial intelligence and i said what else you know about it he said yeah soon they’re going to be robots robots doing everything for us and i was like no but still you would need me and i found like oh my god that’s not a good start of a conversation like like everybody is influenced by this so thank you so much for bringing that human back to to this summit yeah that’s what i thought i’ll add as a you know a conversation from my household this morning thank

you yeah no i i charlotte i hope you’re right that there is a lot of hype there now i’m praying for hype after reading how many of you have read that what i referred to the blog you by deriva modi by anthropic seal place of Okay. Okay. Few hands. I am not even sure whether I want to urge you to go read because it really makes you think. And there were some people who are in the field. They said, I am choosing not to read it because I don’t want to know. No. So it’s a good thing to hear this, that this human in the loop and the way we responsibly develop, because that’s the theme we want to explore, especially in the context of health.

That, I think, is a good segue, Dr. Richard, I want to ask you, start with you. Job of a regulator, I said, is hard. The reason I experienced it firsthand, having now very close. We work with our regulatory system, et cetera, where you have two extreme pressures on a regulator and the one it needs to move fast. It needs to be less like everybody wants it to be. regulation and you want to speed up innovation and any every day gets counted and you are held to the metric. That’s one extreme. The other extreme is, boy, if anything goes wrong, who is the first person? Who approved this? Who allowed it to come out? So, these are two extreme things and usually in a slower cycle, you are able to have some time.

So, how are you thinking about it in the age of both the eye, but in general, in reconciling these two extremes of demands put on

Yes. Thank you for that insight. I have to think on my feet here, but you’re quite right. It’s a matter of industry wanting more results from the regulator. Thank you. investment and also wanting to retain or rather wanting the regulator to retain responsibility when things go wrong. I remember watching a very interesting podcast, I think it was called Moonshot, and in this episode they were saying, well, if all the jobs are taken by AI, regulatory jobs will be the last to remain because people always have, people should always have somebody to blame, right? We can’t say, oh, you know, somebody was harmless. No, AI did it. No, that would never work. So worst case scenario, I’ll be the last person there so that they can hang me when something goes wrong.

At least I have that job security to think about. But really, with respect to what is happening as far as industry’s expectations are concerned, we see a lot of potential in AI. We’re currently working with Grant from the Gates Foundation. on an application for screening applications for marketing authorizations. I think those in our industry, the pharma industry, know that this is the biggest source of angst amongst industrialists that regulators take too long, and we are seen as an impediment to progress, actually. So we also blame industry. We’re saying, well, you know, you submit, you know, incomplete applications and then blame it on us. So we’re hoping that with technology we’ll have, you know, applications in the near future that can work for both sides of the fence, right?

Neutral applications that don’t necessarily speak to one side, but they enable all of us to at least reach a common position very quickly. This is the beautiful thing about computers, right? They don’t feel any type of way. They don’t feel any type of way about you. They don’t necessarily like you. They don’t dislike you. so we’re hoping that this will allow us to do I was just saying not yet so we’re hoping that as we work more towards the development of these tools we’ll be able to see more traction from industry so that we become a more efficient part of the supply chain from development to market and not to be seen as the barrier to entry in this field.

Thank you.

That’s very helpful and also there is both a challenge for a regulator when this AI speeds up the cycle of innovation brings new complexities but also itself a very good tool in either summarizing a complex application or building models that allows a few people to actually have the same capability as a well developed pharma so be on the same page so lots of interesting possibilities here which in India we’re also thinking about. along those lines all three of you are coming from one type of shared commonality which is funding innovation and as a funder of innovation you are also in not too dissimilar way are trying to balance promoting innovation while upholding safety and minimizing risk etc so i would like to hear from each of you because each of you are different kind of funders how you are thinking about balancing these two in the funding programs and scouring innovation and speeding that up you can go in any order you can thumb wrestle

trevor’s pointing to me but i went first last time but now i can go um i mean we we fund uh so you know we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we a range of innovations with ambition of improving and saving lives.

Increasingly, we are funding innovation

you know on the acceleration front we look at it you know on the acceleration front we look at it in that every month we don’t have the next generation malaria vaccine. You know, and certainly every year we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of deaths in young children. Every year we don’t have the enhanced personal coaching in education. We see a generation that is losing opportunities. So we feel a tremendous pressure, I know, from the funder side in terms of how do we speed the availability, the access to a tool which looks like it might be a solution to some of those vexing problems. But I think that it really behoves us here to think about completely focusing on fast might be slow.

And we have to have this moment of reflection because what could derail the good application of AI? You know, you think about it in the health area, which is so sensitive, the few errors, like on the regulatory front, relatively few errors that could occur, the, you know, unfortunate outcome for a patient. which can be attributed to a system which was probably misused by, you know, the people who are using it maybe, but nevertheless will be attributed to AI. And that leads to a tremendous deceleration and things not moving ahead. We take the lesson of the self -driving vehicles, you know, where they may be incredibly good drivers and better than the average human at driving, but one fatal accident puts that whole enterprise at risk.

So I think from the funder’s perspective, we need to have a situation where maybe taking a little bit of a reflective and a slower approach might be fast.

Monika?

So I represent No Notice Foundation and we support health, people and planet both. So at this point, sitting with… funders, global funders. with yourself. And I think it sends a strong message how important AI is at the moment with respect to health. So while we are trying to address as funders different parts of the ecosystem addressing health, but having AI bringing evidence to this really matters. So I think I really feel that having a joint approach towards it is kind of strengthening the whole ecosystem of AI.

QR code allows you to look at it and all the details I believe are there. I have not tried it. I would very quickly like to hear from any of you or all of you. What are you trying to what are you hoping from this? And after this, you know, usually panels, I find panels very boring, by the way. So and as a person sitting there or as a person trying to sit here and trying to give Gyan in two minutes. So I would love to make it more interactive. So get your questions and there is still time. So right after this, hopefully I would like to see you interacting and sharing your thoughts and sharing questions.

I’ll be coming to you. So who wants to say your hope from this call?

Yeah, so we’re really excited about this announcement today. You’ll see it’s the big health research and innovation foundations coming together. to jointly support what is a major initiative. And essentially, what we want to do here is say, how do we generate real -world evidence on what does it really mean and are we really seeing real -world health impacts once we start to integrate AI into different health systems? So we have lots of exciting opportunities that are showing the efficacy of particular application, but what this call really wants to support is rigorous evaluations of where AI systems are integrated into clinical decision -making. Our focus is on low – and middle -income countries. We are interested in really asking a range of questions.

What does it mean for the health system? Are these new initiatives actually operable? Can it be integrated into what often is quite a big bureaucracy of a health system? what are the costs associated with that? Are these interventions actually cost effective? In the end, ministries of health have to make decisions based on affordability. So how do we learn more about the costs of this transition? And what are the things we didn’t expect? Right. And what we see, you know, if we look at the evidence base, we’ve got a lot of exciting evidence of interventions that show promise. We’ve only got a relative handful of rigorous randomized controlled trials that are actually assessing interventions when they’re implemented.

So there’s a massive gap there. And then we’re also now starting to see in different contexts anecdotal evidence of where AI has been integrated, but it’s actually butted against the system. And actually that opportunity isn’t realizing and sort of is showing it’s easier said than done. So basically this investment is to try and address that evidence gap. And I just want to call out that Jay Powell is here and APHRC. who are key partners on this in supporting the implementation and for APHRC, the contextualization of the work that we hope to be supporting in Africa.

Wonderful. Thank you. Anything else, Trevor, you want to add?

Well, I just want to say thanks to our partners that welcomed Novo Nudist Foundation on this initial effort. I hope it’s the start of even more in the future over there because the global health world has been plagued by this lack of primary data. You know, us and others have funded a lot of modeling simulation around global health problems. But you cannot transcend the lack of primary data at the end of the day. And AI is too important for that to be the constraint that impedes implementation at the end of the day.

I thought maybe. It’ll be good to also add that how as we fund this together. envision this as a commitment towards shared standards. So while we’ll be working together as part of this call, we are saying that the real world evaluation is not optional. It is the foundation. And by aligning together, we are kind of defining what good looks like so that we reduce the burden on countries and developers who would otherwise face a patch of I would say patchwork of expectations. And secondly, I would say that by joining hands, we are reducing fragmentation in a rapidly evolving field. And now that we are coordinated, we are getting away with the risk of duplication, the quality that we want to see in the applications or in the products.

And we make sure that the investments that we do are getting into the real world. I mean, they do create an impact because of the coordination that is part of this whole process. And I also say that when we sit together, it adds the seriousness. to the ecosystem that what we are doing is not a side experiment. This is something that we are creating as infrastructure for a long -term process that I would say governments have been asking for it. And the best part as a researcher, I would say, is that we don’t, like the researchers don’t have to navigate three different timelines. Okay, yeah, that’s great for that. And no three different criterias. We just have not like one agreed aligned criteria.

And I would say that no three different deadlines, no timeline. So it makes really life easy as a researcher, I would say. I hope you get some interesting calls from it.

So if we have questions, is there a mic going around? I hope there is. If not, I’ll give you mine so I don’t have to answer your questions. And please, there is one hand up there. Okay, please direct your question. Including to Vikalp, if you have questions. Yep. Let’s start with the gentleman at the back and then you’re up next.

Thank you, folks. Very interesting. My questions around data privacy and data privacy by design. And the lady mentioned three different parameters. Could you elaborate more on how data privacy can be incorporated, at least at a policy level?

Anyone, anyone wants to take that question, at least in the context of this call, I guess you can are in general. Yeah. How are you handling this? Yeah.

So I think health data is quite sensitive and I mean, more sensitive data rather when it comes to country, when it comes to individual, when it comes to even places such as police, military, et cetera. So. So it’s a pretty valid question. Some of the things that we as an organization try to follow is the general guidelines that has been provided by the competent authorities, such as be it HIPAA on the healthcare data or DPDP, which is the Act for Data Privacy in India. And more importantly, if we look at the data exchanges, such as NHA in India have also created clear guidelines. I think following those guidelines and getting yourself tested against those guidelines are fundamentally important.

And it has become so sensitive that today a lot of our customers, they do ask us whether you have a continuous, continuous like sort of applicable certificates from these. privacy authorities as well as these privacy -based frameworks. So that’s how we solve for it. And I think it’s a good thing. In health, it is fundamentally critical. And the technology, how it is growing, I think there are multiple other ways as well, like an end -to -end encryption and so on and so forth, where we can use it to keep things private.

So there are two aspects to it. One is technological, and another is policy. There are other sessions entirely focused on people who are working on it. So I wouldn’t put you in the shoes to answer that. But on the technological front, both Charlotte, if you want to address, or Trevor, on what are some of the things, model learning without data being exchanged, or synthetic data, so many aspects of it which have been at the forefront. And Charlotte, whatever you want to add.

I mean, I just… I just wanted to say, in terms of the evaluation… that we want to support through this funding. We’re very much expecting clearly an anonymity of, you know, basically for those evaluations to adhere to high quality research standards. So the kind of bars and checks and controls that you’d expect if you’re doing any sort of research study on health and the sort of ethical guidance and clearance procedures that you need to adhere to. So for us, that’s just an important part of any aspect of research that we support and that we’ll be supporting in this initiative. And that includes issues of privacy and other things.

Do you want to say anything about the technological emergence of any new technology that has been helping with preserving data privacy, but not the innovative learnings and improvements of the models?

Yeah, Sundar, you know, so I think that for us, it’s. There’s no compromise on. patient data, privacy from the clinical trial, as Charlotte has mentioned over here. But AI does raise a lot of other issues that go almost beyond that. So, for instance, you know, the various models of federated learning that people have introduced where you can have locally private data, but you contribute to the evolution of a model, which improves because it has access to a very diverse data source. Now, has that actually been regulated? We had an example of one of our grantees who produced a very good system for using ultrasound to diagnose certain chest diseases, and it was based on a federated contribution from different groups that kept their own data local and private, but they contributed to the model.

And, you know, that hasn’t really been tested, and all of the policies around is that a disclosure, which is acceptable now in the age of AI, I think it’s something that we may want to. So, I think it’s something that we encourage with the right framework.

Thank you. Do you have the mic? Okay. Then if you have another mic, you can take it to the gentleman, madam, and then after you.

My question is to Professor Watts. You mentioned about clinical decision support. So the context from an Indian healthcare setting, as you’re well aware, is majority of our health is run at the front line. So there’s also an element of operational decision support as such. So there’s a bunch of geospatial AI models that we are working with Google for geospatial inferencing in the tuberculosis space, mostly active case finding and then diagnostic network optimization. So my question is, from an evidence perspective, we obviously are doing some retrospective analysis, and we plan to follow it up with a prospective analysis as such, although it’s a single user. So I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that. I think it’s a great question.

I think it’s a great question. I think it’s a great question. but would this be of interest and what is your level of inclination to operational decision support because I’m a physician myself, I’m a medical informaticist as a PhD. I can tell you for one thing for sure is the patients who come into the system, they’re for the most part taken care of but those are all the silent patients who are out there undetected in the community. So what’s your inclination indeed in this research grant for such solutions?

It’s a wonderful question because essentially I come from public health. So our interest, I think our collective interest is actually how do we in particular focus our evaluations and generate evidence where there’s the greatest opportunity to improve health and to strengthen systems and some of that aspect might be actually how do you other opportunities to other opportunities to really help to improve health and to strengthen systems and some of outreach and improved care for the underserved and so we’re not going to say you know this works and this fits and this isn’t fit but ultimately we are interested in how does that integrate within the system in the call we mentioned the importance of looking at interventions as the primary care level not only at tertiary care and I think the things that will resonate in our interest is is really are there areas where actually the opportunity is big enough that actually it merits that assessments to say is this really translating into tangible health impacts and is the return on that actually affordable and is it something that could be scaled so that issue of you know how does it connect with the system is an important part of the question as well that we’re interested in.

Now I do think it’s a very important question because you’re probably all aware of the constraints that we face now in the global health space in terms of funding. some of the exciting new technologies that are coming along, whether it be at the level of the Global Fund or of Gavi, who both have not met quite the standard that we would like to in their replenishments. So there’s just a reduced amount of funding available for those critical commodities that could be life -changing. And when we get a TB vaccine, which we hope we might have in, say, three years, how are we going to afford to actually put that out to the people who need it?

So it’s exactly the kind of targeting that you’re talking about in terms of risk targeting that can make all the difference in terms of taking now the lesser amount that we can afford, but putting it to where the need is the greatest. And that matching, which the AI systems and that geospatial targeting that you’re talking about, is exactly the solution that we need to promote and understand how it works.

So, person who has a mic, and then you can hand it to the person after you ask the question.

It has been like a great session. So how do we go about building AI agents that are not only intelligent, but reassuring in very high anxiety environments like maternal and infant care? How do we go about that? I would love to hear your thoughts because we’re building something on the same.

When you say high anxiety, just so that.

High anxiety for maternal and infant care, because even myself as a new mother, I feel that there are a lot of open areas where the mother doesn’t know what to do. Right. And it’s an open field. And the pediatricians, Gainax and the mother support system is very low. When you go down to tier two and tier three cities. How do we go about building that? I would love to get some thoughts.

Take it.

So I think one of the things that we have done while we build, a lot of these agentic pipelines for doctors, for users is. having human in the loop while the development is happening is extremely, extremely important. And that’s what Trevor also mentioned, because today, how this can go and where it can lead is not something that you can fully control. And so there are these systems that are specifically designed where an anonymous de -identified conversations are practically being distilled to see if the agents are working together in tandem. The second thing, and that’s more technical that we have sort of figured out is the models are quite capable. But when you are running them with a single goal, or a single agent with a single prompt, that practically, at times narrows down the whole worldview.

But if you are running multiple agents collaborating together where there is a grounding agent whose job is to make sure that the other agent is not sort of going beyond what the boundaries are, I think that is fundamental in healthcare. If it is just a single agent, single prompt and a very, so, and that’s what we should avoid because it’s a quite deep workflow, especially if we look at maternal health and things where the mental health comes into being. It’s fundamentally important that we follow some good technical principle of creating a multi -agent architecture, but more importantly, have a human in the loop. Because we, as a company, hasn’t been able to find a way to get out of it.

That’s why we have like a strong 10 member medical team, which is also growing where these are doctors working with the technology.

Thank you. And unfortunately, I have been told we are out of time, but speakers will be available. If you can please come up to them. And one very quick thing, just before we go, anything you want to share, what you would like to see next year when we come back to AI Summit? I just heard that it is being hosted in Geneva. So we are all showing up there. We have all these aspirations. What would it look like when we show up there to say, OK, this year we did something together? Anything that comes to your mind?

You know, I’d love to see the next iteration of VicAlp’s patient facing agent, and that would be an agent that would be able to guide you in your health pathway, would be completely transparent. And that I would actually understand why it made its decisions. And I would have 100 % confidence. that in that anxiety -provoking situation, it never made an error related to guidances, drug contraindications. It was always correct in those things. And I wouldn’t have to be concerned about that. That’s the next iteration that I’d love to see next year.

Next year, maybe.

And what I would like to have next year is instead of all of us as funders sitting up here, I would like to see some of the partners that we’re funding who are doing work to really understand what this looks like operationally and to have really honest conversations about what’s working and what’s not working. And so we’re moving away from the hype to really actually starting to get into the nitty -gritty of what this could be and can be.

Okay, so quickly, I would like to see a situation where there’s more collaboration between industry and regulators because ultimately we’re on the same side. We want the same thing. better quality safe and effective medicines for all our people so development in that area would be very exciting

final word to you

i think i i would still love to see that no matter how much evidence we generate from ai no matter what we do we still have that last uh word from the doctor who is sitting there and never forget the human angle while we navigate the ai space that’s what i always want to thank you so much

yes thank you so much next time we meet i hope we all feel as optimistic as we do and some some more thank you so much for attending here thank you speakers thank you speakers we just have a souvenir for you from india side for the session thank you so much okay where we go Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you you you you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you

economy. Saibal Chakraborty, Managing Director and Senior Partner, Boston Consulting Group. The moderator, C .V. Madhukar, Chief Executive Officer of CoDevelop. And Mr. Sangbi Kim, Vice President for Digital, World Bank, who will be joining us in a bit. Thank you. right I will let the moderator take it forward

thank you so much thank you Arjun and thank you all to the panelists the last session of the last day is a bit challenging so we will try and keep this focused and at the end if you have any questions we have time it would be great to have any questions if you want to have any discussions I think we have heard a lot about AI and DPI in the last four days I don’t want to belabor the point I think what we can celebrate for sure in India is that in terms of DPI and the thinking that we take to the world and to our own problems is amongst the best in the world.

And as we look at the journey on AI, which is just beginning for most of the world, what I see is if I look at the US, for instance, there is one spectrum of conversation, which is AGI and beyond. And on the other end, there is a despondency and worry and concern about jobs and privacy and a whole bunch of other important considerations. I think where India is, is somewhat different. India is saying, look, there will be a Chinese model, there will be an American model, there will be a whole bunch of other innovations that are going on. What do we do to embrace and use all of this for our benefit? I think that optimism and sense of can do and must do, I think is very exciting, and I think it’s been palpable in the last four or five days.

So to discuss the power of AI and DPI and AI in DPI, we have a wonderful panel as Arjun has introduced already. I will start with Dr. Hans, if you don’t mind. I think you represent a national government and you are living through these choices on a day -to -day basis. As a pragmatic government that has to think about sovereignty, inclusion, safeguards, what are the main considerations that are on top of your mind?

Thanks for the question. You’re right, I think those three words are very key. When you’re talking from a government perspective and therefore national, inclusion, integrity or the safety of the citizens. and also safeguards. I’ll just run through these three very quickly. Why inclusion? When it’s government and you introduce a new capability, you have to be sure that that capability does not increase divides, that it actually reduces divides. So you have to be very sensitive on the inclusion angle. And, for instance, AI, together with DPI, can stretch inclusion through its voice -first capabilities, we talked about cloud -first, API -first, et cetera. Now we can really seriously talk about voice -first and also the translation capabilities.

And accessibility has to be also broadened in terms of multi -modality and also, where necessary, include a human in the loop in the service delivery cycle as well. So some of the inclusion dimensions. Then more to integrity, which is a tougher one, And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. An important point when you’re looking at integrity is to start from the premise that AI will not redefine DPI. AI would, or at least where we look at it from now, maybe I’ll be wrong in six months from today, but the DPI foundations must be in place first. DPI should be mature, and your approach to implementing DPI should be mature, and then you apply AI as a scaffolding on top of that foundation to accelerate your build and delivery.

So what are those foundations? Clean data and data maturity, maturity of your data architectures, clean registers, for instance, also reliable APIs, APIs which are not susceptible to cyber attacks, et cetera, and also the institutional capacity. The institutional capacity behind the DPI delivery. So these are foundations which should be in place. Now, on top of that, you apply AI and there are several unique features of AI which would deliver you super experience to the citizen. And I’ll come to that in a short time. The last one would be the safeguards, bias detection, and also the augmentation to consent. Because when you have AI systems in place, your consent could be AI generated as well. So you need to be careful about the augmentation you require, explainability, and human in the loop as well in terms of your safeguards.

So we need to be conscious that bias, opacity, at scale would mean harm at scale as well. So everything AI scales. So we need to be conscious that bias, opacity, at scale would mean harm at scale as well in terms of your safeguards. So we need to be conscious that bias, opacity, at scale would mean harm at scale as well in terms of your safeguards. Sovereignty is all about capability. It’s not isolation. it’s about building the capability in terms of being neutral and having a neutral capability in terms of vendors, in terms of cloud, in terms of technologies so that you have control, that the state has control over those building blocks and can choose across technology delivery parts as well as core technologies also data classification, protection, privacy basics, so I think if you go back to the foundations of protecting your citizens and their data you can’t go wrong and AI will only be an accelerator finally the experience angle, because a government would be very keen to deliver super experience and where does AI come in here I believe there are some specific strengths of AI when combined with DPIs and that is in terms of in particular API orchestration picking the right API to call at the right time also the fact that AI enables unconstrained scenarios so while linear methodologies would be constrained to say 4 or 5 scenarios when a citizen needs some help AI can do a billion scenarios and each scenario could be implemented using a unique set of API calls and unique set of DPI access and this can be orchestrated using AI so can AI make a big difference a leap forward in service delivery?

I believe so can governments and the sovereign use it or should they? Definitely but we need to be conscious of those 4 dimensions that I just mentioned of inclusion, integrity, safeguards, sovereignty all of these are important and we are still coming together to deliver a perfect experience

Thank you, Dr. Hans. I will give a bit of a breather to Sangbu. Thank you, Sangbu. Great to have you. I’ll go to Robert first and then… Robert, as you at UNDP have led a very important work on safeguards, worked on the Global Digital Compact, engaged a number of countries on sustainable development goals and how AI and DPI can be an accelerant to all of those outcomes if you want. From your vantage point as you look at the AI revolution that’s unfolding upon us, what captures, what’s top of mind for UNDP?

Yeah, no. So I think that the reason we have been so excited about digital public infrastructure as an approach overall is that it really does bring some very particular characteristics. And one of those, maybe the most important, is the population scale. and so it is something that can reach so many people so quickly if you get it right. We also have been learning that if you don’t get it right, then you can have problems and challenges at scale and so in the DPI space, one of the things that concern us the most is how do we ensure that as countries are building their DPI, how do we make sure that we are putting the safeguards in place?

And this is work that has been supported generously by Codevelop and Gates Foundation and others and has led over the last year and a half or so to the creation of a universal DPI safeguards framework which we’re now implementing or supporting a number of countries at national level to implement. But… But when we talk about that, what does it actually mean? And Dr. Hans referred to some of these important things. And so we are talking about the DPI as a whole. And so we are talking about the DPI as a whole. And so we are talking about the DPI as a whole. And it’s about what we’re learning is that the earlier in the process that you can start discussing the safeguards, the better off you’ll be down the road in terms of inclusion.

So if efficiency is your only metric, then you will probably rush ahead and leave people out. But if inclusion is your driving KPI, then you really need to make sure that you’re sitting down at the beginning and planning and designing with people in mind. When it comes to AI, then, it’s basically the same thing. And we need to be really careful, as Dr. Hans was saying, that we are putting the inclusion aspects, the safeguard aspects, at the center of our planning from the very beginning. And so that means, and you referred to a couple of these, but, you know, a multilingual platform, multimodal that can support people with disabilities, making sure that you are correcting for people.

So that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s a really good thing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing. and then of course making sure that data sets are there’s bias detection or you’ve got some understanding of your accuracy representation all of those kinds of things because when you’re going to layer AI into DPI as an accelerator well then you want to be sure that you’re on the right track and that people are considered from the very beginning with that and so I think that’s we see all the

Thank you Rob Can I go to Sangbu now as you see the evolution of DPI plus AI from the World Bank standpoint one of the things that we’ve often looked at is is having open data sets that can train air engines would be an important way of advancing the benefits of AI but as you know governments build silos one silo after the other how are you seeing this from the World Bank’s standpoint what is the next journey for the next 3 -5 years looking like in terms of getting countries to become more AI ready any thoughts on that would be great

DPI has a lot of aspects and characteristics this is one of the very productive and efficient way to ensure the interoperability even though it cannot ensure everything but we make some more effort to clarify some more interoperability capability so but it is basically what it looked like. So that’s why in AEI era, in order to prevent some siloed approach, DPI can play a very significant role, I would say. If you think about the AEI era, what is the relationship between DPI and AEI? If I just compare the DPI from the previous version of DPI, I would say DPI is more helpful for AEI era compared to the previous mobile era in many reasons. If you look back on our history of computing, we started from the computer and PC and evolved to mobile and evolved to AEI.

The trend is that it is from the very supplier -centric approach through the user -centric approach. We are evolving from the supplier mindset through the user mindset. The DPI is exactly just some of the really, really important tools to ensure that user -centricity. Because without identifying some good tools of users and some interoperability, it cannot really be achieved to fully support the user -customized things. So to me, the DPI and AI will be really important relationships. On the other hand, one opportunity… I also see through this trend… maybe DPI can be also very well upgraded quickly and efficiently upgraded through AI enabled technology so we used to collect all the data in a very manual way and then try very hard to streamline the governance of data sometimes very manually and sometimes by some intervention by the programmer but now we can see some old medical way so that we can quickly streamline all the DPI platforms so this is really a good opportunity for all of us from the World Bank perspective we really expect to see some more progress of this space

Wonderful Saibal as a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group you have a bird’s eye view of a lot of early thinking on AI led innovation around the world, especially in the private sector. And I’m also sure you’ve been observing closely the India trajectory of DPI in the last decade or so. What lessons from the DPI journey in India can we take to the AI era that might also propel private sector innovation to levels beyond if we just didn’t think about DPI as core infrastructure for AI?

So I think, firstly, India’s journey in DPIs has been a fascinating one. It makes me immensely proud that whichever country I go to, and I do work with quite a few South Asian and Southeast Asian countries, India is almost always seen as a benchmark in DPI, and now increasingly AI on top of DPI. I think, so maybe I’ll just answer your question in two parts, right? I mean, when we were building DPIs, starting with Aadhaar, you know, and then, you know, moving on to UPI, et cetera, the idea was always to build open population scale software, which can then trigger innovation, right? And that’s exactly what has happened over the last decade, right? The amount of innovation that has been built on these DPIs is mind -blowing.

I mean, India is now a country of 120 unicorns, and every unicorn, some way or the other, leverages the DPIs. So then, coming to the second part of your question, I mean, what lessons, right? So if you look at the way India is now thinking about AI, and as BCG, we have been privileged to be part of two of the very leading companies in the world, right? So we have done several seminal efforts, one with India AI Mission to build AI Coach, India’s national AI platform. and also with the state of Telangana to build the equivalent for the state of Telangana. Both of these happened last year. I think we are taking a very, very similar ethos, right?

So if you think about India, as I mentioned, there are 120 unicorns. There is no dearth of VC funding in India at all. However, 90 % of that VC funding actually goes into fintech and e -commerce. Very little goes into climate and sustainability. Very little goes into education. Very little goes into MSME relevant topics. So there is a gap, right? So what these platforms are trying to do? And then similarly, access to data within private sector, there is good quality data. But the biggest source of data in India is the government. The access to government data is still at a very nascent state. Quality of data and access to data. And then, of course, the biggest thing in AI, which is compute, right?

I mean, access to compute is what makes or breaks a startup. So the way in India, the way I see it, the way we have started thinking about AI platforms, and I’ll use the word platform, it treats AI as a shared public infrastructure. Just like DPI was a shared public infrastructure, it treats now AI as a shared public infrastructure. If you look at India AI mission, more than 38 ,000 GPUs are now available at, you know, less than rupees 60 per hour, which is less than a dollar per hour. So if you are a startup, very early stages, working in your garage, suddenly GPUs have become a bit more affordable for you, right? That’s genuine shared public infrastructure.

Government data, it’s early days, it’s very early days, but government data is being provided access to through platforms like AI Coach, or in Telangana through the TGDX. to solve the financing problem. How do you channel financing into socially sensitive sectors? The central government and the states are thinking of building fund of funds, which actually then, you know, encourage VCs to co -invest, focusing on those socially sensitive sectors where they would normally not invest in. So if you think about it, the ethos is very similar to when we were building DPIs. How do I create shared capabilities centrally, which then can trigger an entire new wave of startups, you know, and therefore a market ecosystem, just like the DPIs did.

So that’s how I see the journey.

That’s great insight. I think it seems from what you say, there’s a beginning of a new innovation cycle for the private sector cycle, and we’re looking forward to what comes out. I just wanted to, we have about 10 minutes left. have a somewhat common forward -looking question to all panelists. As the economists say, in the long run, we’re all dead. But what is long run in the AI ecosystem? Is it five years? Is it three years? Because it’s so hard to predict everything. Every day there’s something new happening. So I don’t know, Dr. Hans, if you’re okay going first on this forward -looking question. The question I would ask of you is, as a relatively smaller island nation, how do you expect to leverage this wave of AI innovation over the next three years, maybe five years?

What steps are you anticipating? How are you preparing yourselves to leverage this power that we have to advance our development outcomes?

So there’s a plus and a minus of being small. Let’s start with some of the challenges. Being small, you’re on the wrong side of the AI divide unless you’re economically in a very powerful position. Say for example, Singapore is an outlier, a small country with a lot of economic power and therefore attracts investors, attracts talent and the sighting of business. Country, one of the challenges we have in Sri Lanka is one, getting that minimum level of sovereign AI infrastructure in place, having the ecosystems around it, retaining our talent. Sri Lanka has very good talent but retaining and developing the talent for Sri Lanka is a challenge but one that we are confident that we can deliver.

So future of AI I think will depend on the market. We’ll also depend on the people. We’ll also depend on the trust in us. The institutions like the data protection, the institutions as well as the laws, and Sri Lanka is very mature on this front. So on the trust side, a smaller country can execute precisely with laser -sharp focus and therefore has a strength. Talent side, again, it’s something to focus on. Now when it comes to the marriage with DPI, I think it falls onto the positives of being a small country because the ability to implement modular systems in a neat and flexible way, in a way that these blocks themselves will evolve, on the confidence that you have a strong trust environment, gives you the ability to build in AI where, like I mentioned earlier, AI sits.

On top of a solid DPI, a mature DPI frame. So I feel the future, AI future will of course be very close, can add that extra piece of experience, lower cost, faster, and more flexible, meaning that it can address multiple scenarios through digital twin and other such AI constructs to deliver citizens a very customized, I’m from the service industry in the past, so I use the word customized, but citizen -specific experience. We’ve been tracking the learning about the focus of the new government and their leadership and the presence of AI in the world. We’re working with the government’s leadership, making big advances on DPA and AI, and looking forward to much exciting stuff in Sri Lanka in the next two to three years.

Thank you for those comments, Dr. Hans. Rob, could I come to you and think about, you know, you’ve gone through the process over the last couple of years with DPI safeguards. You have the Global Digital Compact. I know there’s a lot of work you’re doing on AI safeguards. Moving away from safeguards, I wanted to see how you are envisioning the developmental role of UNDP leveraging AI in the next three years. I guess three years is long term, but anything you can say that would be helpful for us.

No, absolutely. So I think there’s a couple levels. So there is an internal to the organization level, which is how do we ensure that UNDP itself has capabilities for leveraging AI to maximum effect. And so there’s a kind of a base level of work that we’ve done internally to the organization, upskilling programs, investing in some, you know, making sure foundation model capabilities are available, working in some SLMs, et cetera, et cetera. Then there’s the layer of working across the kind of verticals that UNDP has, whether it’s environmental action, governance programs, energy, et cetera, et cetera. And so how do we embed AI solutions and thinking and approaches into those verticals? And then there’s the picture of how are we going to support our country partners?

And as you said, we’re engaged in quite a few countries already on AI transformation support, and it’s kind of looking at ecosystem pieces. Do countries have that mix of elements that Dr. Hans was referring to? Do you have the compute accessibility? Do you have talent? Do you have the data available? And so on and so forth. but the one thing that we’ve announced in this summit, during this summit is an exciting partnership with Xstep and a number of other players and we’re one of those players on something we’re calling 100 Pathways or Diffusion Pathways and that is looking kind of like more of a use case driven approach and finding over the next few years 100 different pathways to scaling responsible use of AI along different use cases and it’s something that we’re really excited about because I think we need that to complement the ecosystem support

That’s so exciting to hear because I think there will be a lot of iteration discovery and innovation to discover those 100 pathways to actually add value to people on the ground looking forward to what comes out of that Thank you if you were to look at the last decade of how development banks have funded and looked at digitization, and now if you look at the three years ahead of you, what might the World Bank and MDBs do differently to be ready, help countries become more ready for the AI era that you haven’t been doing in the last decade or so? Any thoughts would be great.

So good news is that from the Internet network point of view, the coverage is pretty good. So even in sub -Saharan Africa, more than 90 % of area of sub -Saharan Africa is covered by three -plus generation mobile tower. But the issue is that we are really struggling with lack of demand. How are we going to fully utilize this by creating some more value and profit? So now we are modifying some approach to really think about creating demand through government program, through developing some use cases. That’s why we are just keep highlighting the importance of small AI. Small AI is not really a small thing. So it is really about how we can really change the lives of our people.

So our approach is a little tweaking to the user -centric and demand -driven things. That’s our approach.

That’s great. And I think MDBs and the relationships that they have with countries can make a big difference in how the evolution and the benefits of AI will come to people. So looking forward to what comes out. Saibal, I know I started off by bucketing you as a private sector guy. But I also know you’ve been thinking deeply about government policy that enables or doesn’t enable innovation and growth. So as you look at the next few years, even from private sector innovation lens, what government policies might propel the innovation ecosystem? to serve the underserved populations around the world. Any quick thoughts, Saibal?

So, see, I think, you know, the government has a very tricky balancing act, right? I mean, when we were going through this entire experience of building AI Kosh, there’s obviously, for very good reasons, a lot of sensitivity around sovereign data, what data to expose, and if exposed to whom, right? Equally, without sharing of data, I mean, the reason why AI has taken off in a big way in some sectors is because internet came into picture 30 years back, and internet has been pumping, you know, billions and billions and gigabytes of data, right? So AI has something to chew upon. Now, if we have to do the same with government data, then that data, you know, needs to be exposed in a controlled manner.

So my sense is that from a policy standpoint, how do you actually provide that access to data? I mean, walking that tightrope where valuable data is made available to the innovators while not compromising on sovereignty or safety. I think that is one of the policy areas the government has to look at. Specifically for a country like India or similar countries which operate in a federated model, the center can do only so much. The real action, as we know, in a country like India happens at the state level and we have 30 plus of them combining states and union territories. So at the state level also, similar policies and institutions have to be set up. So Telangana, for example, has set up a Section 8 public sector undertaking to drive AI, right?

That creates the kind of focus and the agility that you will need to keep pace with this technology and do some real work at the grassroots. So my suggestion would be create those. Accountable institutions. who can anchor and drive AI and amend policies around data to make sure that people get access, the innovators get access while not compromising on sovereignty. It’s not an easy thing to do, but yeah, those would be my words.

Thank you, Saibal. I think the role of institutions, both for safeguards, but also to enable the innovation ecosystem haven’t been more important than it’s now more important than ever before. I think it’s hard to summarize this conversation, but I will say that I think we’re at the cusp of something extremely important and something very potent in some ways and can unlock a lot of opportunity for innovation. billions of people. Especially, I think, the segment of the population that was left out of the digital revolution because voice was not the predominant way of interacting. I think AI opens up that window and hopefully will drive much more widespread adoption and usage by common people around the world.

Looking forward to the next few years and thank you very much to our panelists for a wonderful discussion. Thank you all. Thank you.

Thank you so much to all the speakers. We will just have one memento being given by the organizing team. We made it. Thank you so much for being a part of the India AI Impact Summit. Just to tell you that the expo will be open tomorrow. People still want to come in and people are still not tired, but we are done for today and the sessions are done. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

All panchayats, all two and a half lakh of them, they are present on eGram Swaraj. For right from planning to the payment stage, everything is done on a portal which is called eGram Swaraj. This portal works in the English language. So I’ll tell you, in 2019 when we were starting something called the People’s Plan Campaign, I happened to attend a Gram Sabha in the state of Karnataka. I was there for something like 45 minutes and I was felicitated and sat on stage. And I didn’t understand a thing. And then it struck me, you know, I had this thing that how do you expect these people really to relate to what is happening? Because it is public money.

Everybody in the panchayat needs money. It needs to know what kind of plans are uploaded, how many works got done that were as per the plans, how much did it cost. It costs them to do it. And subsequently, they can raise issues in the meetings pertaining to the works close to their residences. And along came Bhashini. I think we had in the year 2023 an event called Manthan, where we invited a lot of people from the industry to tell us how we could conduct our business better. And so Bhashini was a revelation. And imagine that a person from a panchayat is looking at the expenses page for his gram panchayat or her gram panchayat. And then by a click of a button, they’re able to see it in their own language.

It was magic. And that was the starting point. Yeah. And subsequently, of course. We went from there and. We found out through a survey that what really hurts a panchayat secretary is not to be able to produce the minutes of meeting in time, which are very important, which are the only record of a panchayat’s proceedings. And then, again, using Bhashini and another tool, we were able to create Sabha Sar, in which if you input the video slash audio recording of your meeting, you are able to get a minuted draft, which you can then edit and upload. So that was miracle number two. And briefly, if I could also address Swamitva, the scheme that you mentioned.

Swamitva is a scheme where drone surveys are carried out over all the village habitations. So there are these pictures that are subsequent. Subsequently converted to ortho rectified images and they lead to property rights. for the people living inside those villages. But the way the images have been captured, there is dense point cloud information, all of which was getting wasted. Why? Because we were confining our attention only to the orthorectified images. So we had the AI guys look at that, and then they converted all those rooftops that they could see into the solarization potential. As a result of which now, out of the 3 .3 lakh gram panchayats where drone surveys have been carried out, in 2 .38 lakh gram panchayats, you can go to gram Manchitra, and you can zoom into your village, and then you can click the icon corresponding to the solar ability potential, and it will tell you roof -wise how many, panels can you fit there.

We’ve gone further. and we’ve integrated that with the PM Surigarh Yojana portal. As a result of which, the Gram Panchayat can drive it like a campaign and lead to greater rewards for everybody all around.

Actually, it reaches the last mile citizen when you talk about those benefits. So India’s last mile operates in local languages and dialects, as you mentioned, solving that problem. So in your view, how critical is language AI in ensuring that digital governance platforms are inclusive and participatory and increases citizen trust and participation in Gram Sabhas?

Like I said, people are now able to follow what was something that was written in. They could still see it, of course. In the English language, then they’d have to go to the person who they knew to be very smart in the village and they’d have this person read it out to them. Now they can see it at their leisure. not just people here but people outside who are working in Mumbai can see what is happening in their panchayats and close to Pune or something and immediately they can get active about it so and the miniaturization tool that I mentioned that opens a whole new set of avenues now you can have a record then against that you can have action taken reports and then you could have follow up in the next meeting it makes it all amenable to very systematic representation on portals so that is what some of the states have already started doing and it is truly remarkable that anybody can go in there and when I say anybody I don’t mean just the panchayat secretaries anybody in a village can drill into their gram panchayats record and see that corresponding to the finance commission grants for any year what was the plan against which how much has been executed, how many bills were prepared against each activity and what is the status of the payment, whether it has been completed, where the asset exists, the geotags and then you can zoom in and maybe see it on Gramman Chitra.

So there are great rewards for everybody all around and we need to of course now intensify it through a capacity building training program. That is something we started doing from the previous year, but it has been an incredible journey. And it is being adopted all over, yeah.

So Alokji, let’s talk a bit about Sabha Saar Impact. Let’s let our audience know about it. And with its launch on 14th August 2025, MOPR introduced an AI -enabled voice -to -text meeting summarization tool powered by Bhashini ASR Services. So as of 4th February 2021, over 1 ,15 ,115 Gram Sabha meetings have been held. process. So this is a good number I need a round of applause. So what structural changes have you observed in the panchayat functioning after Sabha Saar?

Sabha Saar was one thing that we carried out for the convenience of the panchayats and the panchayat secretaries as opposed to E. Gram Swaraj which was our selfish motive. We wanted panchayats to plan there and show all their vouchers there so that we could tell that this is how the money has been spent. But Sabha Saar actually came through as a part of a survey that was carried out using Rapid Pro by UNICEF. We asked something like 8 ,000 panchayat secretaries all over the country that how do you spend your time? How much of it is spent in inspections and attending programs? And meetings and making records? So one thing that came through was the conduct and recording of meetings was the in 65 percent of the respondents.

That was the activity that was sitting, you know, very heavy on their entire time availability. And so having realized this and having the help of Bhashini, we converted it into a tool. So in Bhashini, it’s very simple. There is no big standard operating procedure, as it were. So if you’re standing having a meeting, there has to be a recording device. It could well be your mobile phone. And then through audio or video recording, you can just place it. Each time somebody speaks and later on, you input this into a into the sub -assert tool. the sabasa tool is not something that is a part of the device on which you carried out your recording so the issue related to connectivity in villages is something that we have been able to sidestep and once you do that it gives you a draft minute of meeting so bhashini turns it into English and the English thing is monetized using the AI engine again bhashini gives it back to them in their own language and yes it’s voila the person can just make a few changes and upload it and we’ve had some heartfelt gratitude coming to us from villages as a result of this

ok so has the structured documentation improved transparency participation tracking or monitoring of meeting frequency and agenda quality too

now that the minute is ready if there are 5 items, 10 items ok So the states that have really gone ahead and adopted it, which is Odisha, which is Tamil Nadu, which is Tripura, all these people are into the second stages now where they are looking at the minutes of meeting and converting it into or refining it into tools that help them keep track of the activities after they’ve been created. We also realized through our meetings that why is the number just 1 ,15 ,000? So there are a whole lot of people whose languages do not exist on Bhashani. So from there, we asked those states to provide Bhashani with the necessary expertise so that they can train their bots.

And they’re already working on something like 11 more languages, which includes Assamese and Boro and Maithili and Santal and whatnot. Yes. So those languages are also. So it’s been. So. a very gratifying experience and then the learning continues.

Yeah, it’s commendable that things have reached to that level. So over to you, Amitji, from an accountability lens, does structured documentation change behavior with the governance systems?

Thank you. So I think, you know, so if you have understood the enormity of the situation, right, what we are talking about, 250 ,000 plus gram panchayats and different kind of languages. So just to circle back, if you look at the frugality of the situation, right, so for example, if you look at, in India, generally people talk about either we live in a bullock cart stage, right, or we are aspiring for bullet train, right. So the point is, if AI has to tell us in terms of, you know, how we learn in the future, how will we transform, so we cannot, I mean, leave out 900 plus million people who are living in villages, right. Absolutely. So the idea is not to make it very, very urbanized, you know, very, very kind of elitist idea that, you know, that.

That AI is only for urban, AI is only for industries, AI is only for commercial sector. So, obviously, this is a journey, right? So, you have to start somewhere. So, for example, I mean, the frugality what I was talking about, that we did not ask Gram Panchayat to invest anything, right? All they need to have a mobile phone, which any which way they have, right? And the idea is just to kind of record and upload. Obviously, there will be some challenges and kind of resistance also in the beginning. But, you know, once they get used to it, so, for example, today we are asking them to kind of upload your recording, right? The rest is done by system.

And system also has a provision of human in the loop so that we can go and correct it. Now, tomorrow, we see the next step what we will be doing, what we can do perhaps, right? When the next meeting happens, we can also populate the agenda from last meeting, right? So, what was discussed last time, what was committed, whether you are doing or not doing, right? And then everything goes to kind of public domain. so generally the people who live in city they know that when there is a RWA meeting nobody goes and attend but they all warfare in the whatsapp group in the village also it’s not easy to bring people but once they start getting the hang of it that okay there is a meeting I am getting the mom and it’s available in the public domain we are using AI, AI is for good AI can also be leverage for rural sector why it has to be very very elitist only for passport save so that’s just a beginning it’s just a journey and also if you see from idea point of view phenomenal idea for ministry of panchayati let me congratulate sir and the entire team to think of something like that because AI is all about idea and use case if you have the right idea you can do wonders but you have to have idea and muscles to execute it so that way I believe that this whole documentation will do wonders for them.

Gram Panchayats will also realize something which was missing in the most part of the world that you know the record keeping accountability, transparency so and so forth because generally these decisions were taken by some people only and executed by some and the large population was largely kept out of it knowingly or unknowingly right. So I think that’s what I said that you know it will change the way they work, it will change the way they think because this is only for a you know kind of we are starting only with a let’s say meeting but now they will start thinking and there will be demand from states and otherwise right what more can be done with AI.

So broader scales would be achieved. Yeah Sabasar is an example like Praman we are doing we have launched this Pancham you know bought also for all elected and selected representatives so I think it’s a great you know kind of experience efficiency would obviously help them adopt it. I mean let me tell you in our own corporate meetings we are still some of us making note. despite being on teams despite using co -pilots despite having all tools at our disposal but we are still using it we expect a junior guy to take notes and circle back so that’s a cultural change which you have to also see and these changes and these changes couldn’t have been possible if we wouldn’t have the infrastructure like Bhasni because ministry on its own how ministry got benefited we have infrastructure like Bhasni we have the GPUs got available to us through the NDIA mission otherwise procurement itself could have been a big challenge we have a team to kind of build applications so I think it takes a village to move something so that’s what has happened here

thank you for sharing your thoughts just continuing with that the department of drinking water and sanitation has actually approached us that the meetings of their village meeting VWC’s village water committees. They want to use Bhashini for that and there has been some initial interaction between the two teams.

That’s commendable, I would say. That’s awesome. So Alokji, let’s talk of some implementation challenges in rural India with AI. AI in rural governance is transformating, but complex. So what are the biggest operational challenges, infrastructure, though a bit, I think Amitji was about to share that, but then infrastructure, training, dialect diversivity and connectivity. So what challenges are you facing? How receptive are panchayat functionalities and rural citizens to AI -enabled systems?

Challenges, of course, there are many and you would have anybody tell you. What we have found out, the adoption of e -gram swaraj by our villages gram panchayat and then we have A case in point, Uttar Pradesh has got something like 59 ,000 Gram Panchayats. And for Uttar Pradesh to onboard eGram Swaraj seemed like an impossible task because it involved registering your digital signing certificates and then everybody agreeing to completely dispense with checkbooks. All your payments were then going to be, can you imagine Uttar Pradesh did it in 40 days flat. All 59 ,000 Gram Panchayats. So my point was that if you are ready with a product that addresses their needs and it is friendly and it meets, of course, my need was that I needed the money well accounted for and their need.

It was a system that could make it very easy for them to do it. So we met halfway and if UP can do it in 59 ,000, I am not prepared to hear an excuse from any other state in the country. It’s a trial by fire. Likewise for Sabasar, Sabasar again I said initially that there was a demand that was indicated from the state. So when we set out to meet that, we were clear what is it that we are looking for and people were so forthcoming. In fact, Bhashani also enabled me to write letters to the states in their languages and people were gushing with affection and what not. I got a letter in Telugu for the first time and all that.

So there are challenges but then the Ram Panchayats are predisposed to meet you halfway. So you need to begin that journey and we have seen that with regard to a number of things. There have been campaigns. Every year they carry out a campaign from 2nd October to… the 31st of December, which extends to January typically, where all two and a half lakh gram panchayats prepared their gram panchayat development plans and uploaded on the portal. So 2 .5, 250 ,000 gram panchayats, all of them planning for the next year. And so before you enter the next financial year, their plans are ready. I mean, we don’t do it in the departments, in the ministries. And all these gram panchayats have not done it once, twice.

They started in 2018. They’ve continued to do it ever since. In the COVID year, there was a request that we don’t do this campaign. So there was a massive pushback from the states that, no, we want to do it. The inertia was so great that they still did it. So there are challenges. But if we make an application like he was saying, that this is a simple recording device, this is a mobile phone, there aren’t things that you need to procure to set it up. So if you make a simple tool, people would grab it with both hands. So I think that is the embracing of challenges rather with the response we are getting with Bhashani.

So for ministries delivering last mile services such as Ministry of Rural Development and the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, what lessons from MOPR’s AI journey would you share? How important is open architecture and interoperability in your sense?

That is dangerous territory. I am not in a position where I could start advising anybody because they have got pretty robust systems of their own. If you look at Manrega Soft and the PM Avas Yojana, because they are running schemes which are very pointed. Avas Yojana is just about houses. Manrega is a scheme where there is of course it is as large as the things that you do in the Finance Commission. It is a very big scheme. It is a very big scheme. but it is fairly well organized and in all of these typically the beneficiary is the individual. In Panchayati Raj mode there are individuals at the end of it but our emphasis is on the institution, the Panchayat and not just E.

Gram Swaraj and the things that we do for their accounting and planning. We also hooked up with the meteorological department and there are daily forecasts being generated for every Gram Panchayat. This people are able to see on their phones and all with the similar ability as they are able to see everything using Bhashini. So it’s a great enablement all around and it can only get better.

Absolutely. So Amitji over to you. How critical is open architecture ensuring long term sustainability? And avoiding vendor lock -in.

if I can take a minute and talk about the previous question please go ahead sir rightly mentioned that different ministries have got a different mandate it’s not an apple to apple comparison but see you also have to see the panchayati raj the main role of panchayati raj what I understand is the mobilization because they are not running major schemes on their own compared to others and generally the best practices doesn’t have to be in form of technology or architecture only the idea is that if you go down from top there are two different ministries and if you go to the village you will see the same infrastructure, same set of people are only working from both departments right so the idea is if one can do others can also do So there is a lot of learning in terms of method that how we could overcome, how could we mobilize, how we could implement some of these solutions.

And I’m sure we know that RD and agriculture are also doing a lot of things, but their mandate is much bigger. But they can also, you know, take a lot of pride or kind of learning from the success which we have, right? What was the second question? The second one was that how critical is open architecture in ensuring long -term sustainability and avoiding the window lock? So you must be hearing this word called sovereignty quite a lot, right, nowadays. So the whole idea of, you know, being sovereign in any part of the, you know, technology, be it defense, be it IT, be it any way, it’s a survivability, right? So the idea is despite, in spite any kind of, you know, geopolitical risk, we should survive.

Yeah. Our system should run, right? So for that, generally, people confuse sovereignty with also making India local, et cetera. So that’s not the case, right? We will always have. some technology from outside. But we have to design in a way that it is kind of ready to shift, right? So either from a technology point of view, we have the interoperability, the standards which we have chosen, the models which we have chosen, the infrastructure which we can move around and the teams which can control, right? So the data residency has to be within India and data is with us. So obviously if we have trained on one, we can train on something else also. So the idea is also to look little bit long term.

See, what has happened that when we started, obviously there were a lot of POCs. Nobody knew, right, how AI will behave. Still we don’t know. Still we don’t know, right? I mean, so obviously that you have to start somewhere, right? And then you have to also ensure that in future, when we start with one use case, it becomes easy, right? When the department itself becomes fully AI enabled and we have 10 AI use cases running, then it becomes a problem, right? Problem of management. So that’s where I think we need to plan better for future. so that we plan. I mean, it’s not that a use case is defined. Then we found an easy method of procurement of infra or the model which I knew.

So going forward, I think there will be a platform approach. So where we have to think for future also that, okay, these AI cases are likely to come in future as well. Different kind of AI, be it agentic, be it gen -AI, be it conversational, be it computer vision analytics. And accordingly, we have to have open architecture like the way we did in a normal digital transformation. Even digital transformation, there used to be time where we created our own independent monolith applications. But now we are creating applications, you know, which are more API -based, can integrate with anybody, right? And futuristic, can scale our modular. So same concepts have to be used for AI initiatives as well.

Well said. So I think adoption comes with responsibility and that’s what you are scaling at, looking at the future. So Alokji, Sabha sir demonstrates how language AI can power grassroots governance. After Sabasa’s success, what deeper integrations do you envision with Bhashini and what does the next phase of collaboration looks like? Let’s talk about that.

And we would like through, and people are going to be speaking in any number of languages. I think the next step, my government is something that has already been very, always been very invested in providing services to making ease of living easier, as it were, and providing all manner of things. Everything is finally a service. You need to look at a doctor. You need your road fixed. You need a street light to be working. You want the log water to be drained or something. She needs more attention than us. Yeah. Okay. Over to you.

So people should come to expect. they should demand these services from their gram panchayats. There are mechanisms of doing that because gram panchayats don’t have a lot of resources in terms of manpower, in terms of people who are at their beck and call to carry out the activities that are flowing from the charter. So there are systems in a lot of these villages. You have common service centers in some states. They have their own system of common service centers like UP, like Bapuji Seva Kendra in Karnataka, like Mi Seva. So we need to take that further and we need people to be able to talk and find out if a certain service that is available to them, can they avail it in their village?

If they are to do that, what is the mechanism? And if they’ve already made an application, that what should be able to tell them that where that thing currently stands? so that is a very wide area like I said that there are a number of services we also learnt of a pilot that was carried out in Guwahati where the bus used to have a camera it used to drive through capture all number of images and basis that it would assign issue labels to them as it were if there is a drain overflowing so it takes note of that if there is a pothole then it takes note of that and then it assigns it to all these agencies whose job it becomes now to fix that so not that but maybe we have a mobile interface called Meri Panchayat which ports a lot of information from E Gram Swaraj Meri Panchayat also has the capability of capturing images of the issue that is being reported I think the next step is that image it makes sense of the image and it assigns it to the necessary department.

There are people who are mapped whose job it is to carry it out and within a certain amount of time it doesn’t happen, then there is escalation. We need to go deeper into that system. That, I think, is the next frontier. And, of course, because it involves vocalization of your demands, so bhasini is absolutely critical in this. So when we say there is a long way to go, I think that phrase is no more relevant. It’s a short way, but not even a big journey, an intelligent journey to move ahead.

So India is building public digital infrastructure for AI at scale. So how do we balance scale with accountability and public trust? We have talked much about how we are building things. But let’s talk about the other side. And can India lead the world in population scale? Of course it can. I am sure about that. But then multilingual AI for governance, when it comes, if you would like to have a shot at it first,

so one thing you all have to realize that whatever we do is a population scale and unparallel right because of our size so even our POCs exceed the kind of performance of European countries our UP sir talked about UP 60 ,000 panchayats if you look at UP maybe it will be in top 10 country right sir in terms of population and size I think the world is vouching for us when it comes to the use cases yeah see if you look at that we have got that scale now we have the experience behind us right we did Aadhaar, we did UPI we did Fastag, we did GST and we did Income Tax so now we have that confidence behind us that we can do anything of scale and with the same Prugal approach we will do 10 times cheaper than Western world and certainly not worse better only right so in terms of that and also from last decade we have evolved right so for example the concept of privacy like dpdp act consent based usage like you know adhar brought so a lot of things have improved from a policy side of it now now once you have policies in place systems are easy because system themselves act as a rule you know once you have policies in place then you don’t need so much of human intervention or discretion so since we have done it since we have kind of you know done so much so now if you look at the very simple case bhashni i remember four or five years back and i and amitabh used to i mean kind of debate also whether we need a bhashni okay right because we we had some of the google translate services so on for forth right but the idea is that i mean in the hindsight that was the right call right in future we have to have something called sovereignty word right we have we don’t have to dependent I mean we need to be frugal and we don’t want to use you know the applications which are very expensive from a taxpayer money point of view so similar things we have done a lot right so I think the next step for example if you look at roam around in AI summit you will see how many LLMs and SLMs we are building on our own right honorable ministers talked about five layers application I think we have ample talent to build applications LLMs we use open LLM but we are developing our own and Bosnia also like one of the common infrastructure energy will take care right infra and chips anyway will have dependency but that’s the rest of the world also has a dependency right not that everybody has a rare earth and everybody is building chips so that way I believe that you know that and because we have that technical know how also I mean that’s our kind of bread and bread and butter now a day right so we’ll be able to take the learnings from all these systems and we’ll move forward as of now we were a bit slow in last year or two because AI itself was new for everyone so we took some time but now I think from this year onwards we’ll really scale it up because we have tested the blood, we have seen the success and we will scale it up

sure, thank you for sharing that so as we come towards the closure of this conversation I would like to leave with one final thought which is like if Panchayati Raj institutions are the foundation of democracy can AI when built on a public stack and powered by language inclusion become the strongest enabler of participatory governance in 21st century just closing thoughts from you both Alokji, would you

absolutely he was just telling you that that we’ve been able to do things at scale this thing about UP that I told you I wear it like a badge that to have done it in some place so and it’s not an easy ask because there are so many stakeholders they’ve got various kinds of issues of their own you’ve got to engage with them address those things and if my problem is well defined and if I know what kind of a thing is going to help me redress that like Bhashini did for us I think that what you said is going to come true because that is so being able to understand my problem and knowing what parts of the problem can be fixed in what manner using the various tools that are available that is the key and it’s not an over simplification but good servant bad master so that is something that stays and it is not going to land you in the right places if you just let it go around like an animal.

But then if you know where to put it, what modules to be inserted, what has been used in the background, and so that would make you more confident. I’m not really an AI person, so I’m just speaking on the strength of what I’ve learned and the experience thus far has been outstanding, partly because we’ve had a very good partner. But other than that, I am not throwing it all open out to AI. I don’t wear T -shirts saying I love AI or something, but I have a problem and it needs fixing and I need to be able to know what aspects of AI can help me fix that in the best possible manner. And that’s my thing on this.

Yeah. So like like sir said, you know, sir is not a person. Neither am I. So if you look at, you know, that he was transparent enough to share that. No, no. So look at that way that none of us were right. Because if you’re talking about AY, I’ve been doing this, you know, digital transformation for public sector for over 20 years. Obviously, there was no AI even when there was no DPI, DPG also, you know, what we kind of retrofitted with the names. Right. So if you look at the idea of Panchayati Raj itself is a participative governance. Right. That people have to assemble in the Gram Sabha and decide on the money which they are getting, how to spend and prioritize.

Absolutely. And if AI tools like Pramana and Sabha Sar and Pancham can help that strengthen, what best you know you can expect from from a participative government, from a democratization point of view. So I think this sometimes, you know, that technology becomes secondary. And in my view, most of the time, right, the ideas have to be clear in terms of what you want to achieve. and what problem you want to solve, what scale you want to solve, what are the guardrails you have to kind of, you know, also put in place. So, for example, when we do AI, that it cannot be 100 % autonomous, right? Of course. And it cannot be 100 % human in the loop also.

Because if we have each and every transaction being, you know, approved by human in the loop, then it defeats the purpose of AI. And there is no AI, right? Then we are still living in the rule -based algorithms. Algorithms. So the idea of, you know, that AI will be that we also train, monitor, have the mechanism to take complaints, have the mechanism to perfectly, you know, kind of train it better so that we improve our accuracy. So that is how AI journey. So AI journey is slightly different from the previous digital transformation journey, which were more like a transactional systems, right? So that way, I think, if you look at currently also Sabasar, I think whatever I am hearing from people, market teams also, So it is giving great accuracy, right, in terms of translation and summarization.

And I’m sure whatever there are little bit areas to improve, it will improve on its own. So we cannot stop it, right? So once we have boarded a flight, then we can only get down at where we have to, right? So I think future is bright. And also from a MOPR experience point of view, it will also, I’m sure, energize and motivate a lot many others. I can say with my experience that if MOPR can do in rural, we can use AI tools. There is no stopping for us as a nation.

Exactly. This is truly an achievement when it comes to MOPI with the government. So you want to say anything regarding this, Alokji?

I thought of another application that works. That is something we’ve been working on, which was spatial development plans. Okay. we again engaged with a lot of panchayats that were close to the highways okay so typically if a panchayat is on a national highway close to a big city and have a population of 10 000 plus then you were eligible to participate in this program okay so there were 34 gps that we involved and we got the planning and architecture colleges to prepare spatial plans for them spatial plan would be futuristic it would zone and it would you know assign it would look into the future and see how this place was going to grow it would devise road networks or something and tell people what they would become over a period of time we had a conference with with gram panchayats around bhopal building and the people were so annoyed We don’t need a spatial plan.

Over a period of time, of course, we told them what it was going to be, but we had this epiphany that people need to be able to see what the spatial plan will help them become. And then we went into the next national conference. We had for each of these 34 spatial development plans a visualization. And we showed people that if you want to become this, you have to do this. And then there was greater enthusiasm. So the people on whom this plan is, who are going to be subjected to this plan, if I could use those words. So these people, if they’re not on board, there is no way you can carry it out. And that, I think, is wide open.

And we’ve had after that. the entire state of Andhra Pradesh has gone ahead and said that all their planning is going to be spatial plans. So that is something that is amenable to AI tools. And a final thing that I remembered that lots of times we need to convey through audio video messages. He mentioned Pancham. So Pancham is a WhatsApp -based chatbot platform which allows us to have two -way conversation with all the sarpanchas and panchayat secretaries in the country. So all these people. And so if there is messaging that needs to be conveyed, if there are videos that need to be quickly created using AI tools, that is something that would be hugely effective in getting the message across in the quickest possible way.

Thank you. Thank you so much for such endeavor. insights on the Gram Panchayat and how things are working behind. Actually, I’m sure the audience was truly, they were unknown about what’s happening around and this conversation has given a new tangent to how we look at the rural development. Thank you so much Shri Alok and thank you so much Shri Amir for sharing these thoughts on Gram Panchayat development. Thank you so much for this fireside chat. Thank you. I would like to call Ms. Deepika to please felicitate Mr. Alok.

Industry bodies, we are working on retraining. Through the higher education department, we are looking at making sure that AI is taught across all courses in all universities and all institutions so that everyone, irrespective of which branch they study, are aware of how AI can make a difference to them. And our school education department has announced as a matter of policy that AI would be taught to school children right from class three, from third grade. So in that sense, we are looking to make AI truly inclusive and train the next generation to adapt to AI and ensure that those who have already joined the work stream are also retrained for this purpose. I’m once again delighted that this event is taking place and it will generate more commitments to further strengthen this global network of institutions.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Krishnan, for these insights. delightful remarks, especially around democratizing access to AI resources as well as keeping humans at the center. Now I would like to call upon Sri Amit Shukla, Joint Secretary, the Cyber Diplomacy Division from the Ministry of External Affairs. Can we have a round of applause for Mr. Shukla, please?

Sri S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT, my dear friend, Professor Ravindran, Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Artificial intelligence has emerged today as an enabler for the welfare and progress of humanity. Whenever AI is deployed with purpose, it can catalyze economic growth and social empowerment. government for all. Yet, only countries with AI capabilities can reap actual AI benefits to their fullest potential. We must collectively address this anomaly and ensure that the benefits of AI is equitably shared. Else, this very revolutionary technology could only bring the widest unfathomable divide among countries. Countries, especially from the global south, face resources and access constraints. This inhibits their pursuit to harnessing AI for economic and development opportunities.

A collaborative international effort becomes highly relevant to bridge this emerging AI capacity divide. India, with this conviction, has been a strong proponent for international AI capacity building cooperation, especially for the global south. Our long -standing ITEC program is the testimony to this belief. Under the ITEC program, we have imparted training to thousands of officials from 160 countries since 1964. We have deployed our vast and rich network of institutions and training facilities for this purpose. Annually, around 10 ,000 fully funded in -person training opportunities programs are offered to nearly 400 courses at 100 eminent institutes in India. Some of these training courses are AI courses and we intend to expand this further. In this spirit, we stand with the initiatives of the United Nations and welcome the establishment of the Global Network of Centres for Exchange and Cooperation on Capacity Building.

The network would bring unique expertise and perspectives from different regions of the world. This diversity would only enrich the purpose of the network in its assessment of local AI capacity needs. The network must truly facilitate sharing of expertise, training use cases and developing infrastructure for countries. We have developed our expertise in successful, innovative AI technologies. . Our achievement on integration of DPI solutions and adoptions. into AI to leverage technology for social and economic progress could add value to the network. The AI capacity building models under India AI mission would be relevant for the network. I congratulate all the participating countries on launching of the framework for the network. As we stand today, we have 14 countries already nominating institutions.

These are Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Guinea, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovakia, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vietnam. It is a matter of satisfaction that IT Madras from India took the initial steps in this endeavor. Let today’s steps of the network build tomorrow’s bigger strides. Thank you.

Sorry, could I make a quick announcement to have all the panelists and the speakers on the stage for a quick photo? Mr. Shukla? We will have a quick photo opportunity with all of the featured speakers for this session and we will proceed with the panel right after. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. S. Krishnan and Joint Secretary Shri Amit Shukla. We will now proceed with the panel discussion. Thank you. I would now like to invite Dr. Mehdi Snen, a Senior Advisor to the UN Secretary General’s Tech Envoy, to please introduce the panelists and moderate the panel. Thank you.

He’s coming back. Thank you so much for your excellencies setting the discussion regarding the Global Network for Centers of Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building. It’s truly my honor today to welcome these distinguished panelists today on the panel to talk about the network, explain how it started, where we are heading to, and then what are the biggest plans we have for the network. I’m Mehdi from the UN, and I’m today happy to have Sayyidina Musa from the UN. the Center of Senegal, Habib Abdurrahman, Abdurrahman Habib from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Fitsun from Ethiopia, and Dr. Ravi from IIT Madras. And I’ll start with a kind of chronological order of how we have set up the network that started with an initial call from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Kenya during the General Assembly, calling for member states to join their effort to build a global network on AI capacity building that could truly leave no one behind, in particular in the needs of building the AI national strategy and building local and sovereign national AI capacities.

Dr. Abdurrahman, I’ll start with you as the chronology of the genesis of the network. I know that there is a lot of initiative coming. in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia related to the AI. You are leading one of the centers that has been already established with UNESCO. I see that there is a lot of UN agencies also collaborating and cooperating on building this kind of network beyond the actual one. I would like to start by asking, how do you see the cooperation? You are leading one of the UNESCO centers in Saudi Arabia. How do you see the cooperation? How do you see the cooperation and diesel cooperation among the different networks, but also among the different networks held by different international organizations today?

Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. It’s a pleasure to be here and seeing our friends. I’m so excited and happy to see the dream is coming true. A couple of years ago, we started multiple meetings saying we want to work on capacity. We think capacity is a very important thing. We think capacity is a very important thing. building is one of the most critical parts, and at the same time, it needs a lot of investment, and we need to come together to build it together. Long story short, we sat with multiple countries. I’m very proud that we and Kenya, especially Philip, Ambassador Philip, he’s not here, but we managed to put together the first meeting in order for us to talk about it.

It was very challenging at the beginning. That wasn’t part of the plan, wasn’t part of an official gathering, but we believe that capacity building needs to be a network. We need to work together, not scattered, and we need to support each other in programs. In Saudi, one of the strengths that we have in the past couple of years is actually capacity building, and that’s why we tried to show what’s been done in Saudi, especially for the Global South, for all of us today on the table, I believe. All of us are very proud of the work that we’re doing. have big population, young population, that they are eager to learn. I’ll just give an example.

When we started Women Elevate program at our UNESCO center, we thought Women Elevate program will show them how eager those students are. So the goal of Women Elevate is to empower ladies globally on AI by offering a training program for 25 ,000 ladies as a goal for three years. Only in the past year, we managed to finish 6 ,000. The number is not important. What’s actually important is to see what is the success rate of those students in the program. This is an online program, fully online. We provide, of course, mentorship, and we provide the support, and it finishes with a certificate from Microsoft AI 900. This is 26 hours of training. That’s about five to six weeks. More than… 89 % of the students are finishing the courses and getting the certificate.

Now 6 ,000 of them have done the program and almost the majority of them got the certificate. We’re talking about more than 86 countries this program covered. And we believe such programs and many other programs globally will be able to make a dent and change the future for so many of our citizens. And especially for women and I mean it for Global South. In Global South we look at technology differently than the northern part. Many of our colleagues and sisters they look at IT and STEM overall as the go -to major and the go -to place to learn and equip in technology. Therefore you will see that we have 29 thousand ladies registered in the program. Can you imagine that 29 ,000 ladies just since June want to continue and learn in this program, and we will be hopefully able to cater and finish this target and move to new targets as we go.

Not only that, but also we twisted the program a bit by offering the program for public servants. Unfortunately, we are only offering it for public servant ladies. So, for example, in Kenya, Philip managed to train the majority of his team and the working groups, more than 300 ladies now already trained in the foreign affairs in Kenya. And that’s what we want to see in delegation and many other programs, and that’s what we are hoping to achieve in the next couple of years. So I’m very excited and happy to see that dream came true, and we are in a network today where we will share programs, and we will hopefully share even more and more success. We will share this story as we go with our colleagues.

Thank you.

Dr. Abdurrahman, thank you so much. This is impressive numbers you’ve articulated there, and I’m happy to count on your support. This is, as I said, this is a member -state -led initiative, and it’s proposing centers, as our officials from India already expressed. One of the first centers to join is, thanks to our Professor Ravi, a colleague now from the scientific panel, is IIT Madras. So you took the initiative of initiating that, so probably you really see the outcome and the value of that. Firstly, as a professor at IIT Madras in India, and secondly, as a scientific, joining the UN scientific panel, what do you really expect from the network? How do you see the value of that network?

Great. So first off, I mean, I’m super thrilled that we are here now, that we have actually gotten this. moving and the thing with for India so for us it’s we are a country in multiple parts we are like a curate some parts of the country which is a lot of talent and other parts of the country where we really have to start building our own networks for doing this kind of capacity building and so we know the difficulty and value of making sure that the entire population is skilled at least AI literate and have the capacity to contribute meaningfully both to an AI enriched economy and as well as the AI development going forward and I believe this is a conversation that cannot be done within the country alone so we really need to get everybody on board and as an academic what I’m looking at is just taking all my other hats off just putting my teacher hat on I don’t even know how to teach anymore.

So that’s the truth, right? The skilling, the learning, the mechanisms, the facilities that are available, and even the training that the children who are… I teach at a university. I shouldn’t call them children anymore, but anyway. The students are going through when they come to us, right? It’s very different. There’s a lot much more self -learning. Students are more comfortable doing things on their own, and in fact, trying to force -fit them into a classroom setting is always challenging, right? But then, what I’m also seeing is that everybody, everybody wants to know AI. Everybody wants to use AI. And I think that’s correct. Not because I want more people to do AI research. I’m not looking for more grad students or research assistants, but it is because every walk of life is going to get influenced by AI.

So when we talk about capacity building in AI… It is not just capacity to do AI better, but capacity to use AI to do whatever you want to do better. And that, I think, is a global imperative. Everybody should know how to use this technology so that as a planet, as humankind, we are able to jointly elevate our worth. And so, as Professor Bengio was saying in the morning, we want everybody at the table. Well, nobody is the dinner. That was a very provocative statement. It leaves a powerful image in your mind. But I think that’s important. And what we are doing here is great for that. And now, putting on my panelist hat. Do I have a couple of more minutes for the panelist hat?

Do I have a couple of more minutes for the panelist hat? Okay, I’ll take that as an yes. I was not ready for that question. I’m not supposed to answer the questions. Sure. So from the viewpoint of the scientific panel, so the whole idea behind the scientific panel is to provide evidence -driven, science -based approach to the state of AI, the impact of AI, and the potential progress of AI in the coming times. So in that sense, unless we have meaningful engagement with the global majority, with everyone in the globe, it’s going to be futile trying to say that the panel is going to talk for the world at large. And for us to have that conversation, we need to make sure there is a sufficient amount of…

of expertise, sufficient capacity around the globe to engage in that conversation. So I think that is important. I’m pretty sure the panel had a tough time finding enough representation from the global south. Thank you so much. That you can answer. We need to get that. Yeah, true.

Thank you so much, Professor Ravi, and thanks for your kind words. So started with Saudi Arabia and then India. Saudi Arabia offered the first center, and then Senegal offered the second center, and to host the second meeting of the network that happened at the end of January in Dakar, and our host today is with us. So, Sadie and I, you are a former UN Secretary General, a high -level advisory body on AI member, and among the recommendations, there was this network of capacity building. I recognize some other HLAB members sitting there. I don’t think in the room. so they will be watching you closely. I’ll give you my microphone, no worries. I’ll give you mine.

So when you’ve done this recommendation, you have the best view on what you expect from the network. We’ll make it, because we are running out of time. But please give us more clarification on the initial area and then the current implementation and where we are heading to.

Thank you, Mehdi. I’m very excited to be here. As you say, the network of AI Capacity Building Center was one of the recommendations of the H -Lab. And the two first ones were the panel and the global dialogue. And as you say, the idea of the panel, was to have evidence on opportunities and challenges on AI to give to policymakers. And the dialogue… was to bring all countries together to have this dialogue around AI. But as you know, when we have all countries, there is this gap between countries. There is some countries who understand what’s going on and others who are here but don’t understand all the trends, all the risks, all the challenges, all the opportunities of AI.

So that’s why the network of capacity building on AI capacity building was also proposed to give the opportunity to help countries to have more understanding on AI and to build their own ecosystem. And with the network, obviously, now… being a reality. I think that what we have done since then is to adopt our cooperation framework. We begin the work in India here with IIT Madras, and the cooperation framework is now adopted during the workshop in Dakar, where we had, I think it was six centers which adopted it. And we talked about what could be the way of doing things within the network. We worked on an offer sheet so that each network who came, each center, who came in the network can offer some services to the network.

And we are still working on stabilizing the office sheet. And the next step will be to have a blueprint because it’s important to help also countries which haven’t a center yet to build a center. So we will have a blueprint on how to build a center. I think that we asked Audet to do the first draft. And we worked on a couple of activities we can do. And one of the main project is to have a capacity building. And I think we will work on it with Abib and so on. And we try to have all the big projects. Multi -country projects. so we can work together and help each other. And the next step will be to have perhaps a third meeting.

Habi was talking about having it in Riyadh, I think. So perhaps it will be at Riyadh before the summit on July.

Excellent. This is excellent news. Excellent news. So our centers get prepared to come to Riyadh. Exciting city. I’ve been there recently. Good. So Kingdom of Saudi Arabia started the initiative, India first center. Africa was strongly represented by Dakar as a second host. And then we got among the first cohort of centers that joined are Ethiopia. Dr. Fitzsimmons was joining us in IAT Madras and then in Dakar. With that, we’re going to wrap up the session. with a strong enthusiasm regarding the center. As a center who joined, not building the initiative, but joined it, you have for sure seen something within that initiative that attracts you. And I’m sorry we are running out of time, so maybe we have two minutes, but I want to listen from one of the first centers to join the cohort.

Why did you join the network?

Thank you, Mehdi, and I’m very happy to be here and also very happy to be part of the network. So I’ll tell you how we got into this. So I’m part of a network of African labs supported by IDRC called AFRD Labs. And we saw that. Like, there is a need for collaboration across Africa. to develop our AI capacity. And we were introduced to this new program that we thought that would actually help us in actually creating the network. And in fact, joining the network would help us, want each other to develop our capacity and lean on our neighbors not to be left behind. For example, in Ethiopia, there is a huge investment in AI by the establishment of the AI Institute.

And it was responsible for developing policy, developing strategy, and also supporting capacity building. And from a university, like the university itself, started thinking about AI and started its own policy in the way like… education is delivered. And then an AI course was built, developed, and when we looked at this, we still are left behind. We need to become more competitive. And for that, we need the capacity building. So this network provides us opportunity. Not only that, we can also help others because we understand the context, the local context. The problems we faced when trying to establish our own centers. And our discussions actually helped us understand that, oh, okay, we are in it together, so we can help each other get there.

So that’s why, actually, we were very… We were very enthusiastic. And the government was very enthusiastic about saying, oh, okay, we should join this network. Thank you.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Again, so we heard a lot from the investigators, principal investigators, the designers, the participants, all the enthusiastic centers about the network. Now, in a very short answer, I’ll get back to all of you. How do you see the network in the next five years? Meaning we have at the UN the 2030 SDG goal. In 30 seconds, if you can do it, how do you see the network in 2030 contributing to that? Or where do you see the network in 2030? Dr. Habib, please.

Okay. Thanks, Mehdi. In 2030, I think that the dialogue is here. If the network. Work well. we will have a meaningful dialogue. It’s not only some countries who will lead the discussion, but all countries in the world, I think. I believe that the network will grow exponentially. We’re a small number now, and we already grew exponentially in the past couple of months. This will continue as a trajectory for quite some time. But what’s more important is that the platform is there now. So we can share experiences and share programs in a way that we didn’t have before. And by doing so, I believe that will also contribute to our beneficiaries, whomever they are, and we’ll receive more and more training and more capacity will be built in that program.

Thank you.

Thank you. In five years, where I see the network is that it could have… distribution of capacity. When I say that it’s not only the compute power, but the human power as well. We will have no one left behind, which means you have people that can do research and generate new knowledge, and people that can use AI and develop their livelihoods. That’s where I see the effect of this is going to be for all these countries involved. Thank you.

Dr. Ravi.

has the categorization of countries as to how ready they are with regard to AI. So five years from now, I wish the network would have contributed to such an extent that the UN would have to redo the categorization. So that they have to take the topmost level and start splitting it into four as opposed to having four levels of AI readiness. So everybody is at the top level as we imagine it now. And then we’ll go on from there. Thank you so much, Ravi. The floor is yours, yours, Chair MC.

Thanks for all the panelists and thanks for joining us for this short discussion. Thank you, panelists, for that insightful discussion. Before we proceed with the closing remarks, I’d like to remind the audience that we will soon have with us Sri A. Revan Thretty, the Honorable Chief Minister of Telangana, a state that’s emerged as one of the leaders in industrial innovation and technology -led governance. And he will be presenting a keynote address on AI and cybersecurity, Harnessing AI Power in the State’s Growth. Those who would like to stay back for that session, please be seated. Those who would like to leave after the ODIT session, please use this door. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was a really insightful panel which spoke about the needs of the Global South, capacity building for women and youth particularly.

And now moving on, we would like to invite Mr. Vilas Thar, President Patrick J. McGowan Foundation, for his keynote address. May I please request Mr. Thar to come on stage?

Thank you so much and good afternoon, everyone. What an exciting conversation that wraps together so much of what we’ve heard over the summit. I want to acknowledge Your Excellencies, our friends here in the room, and I want to take this few minutes to share with you three ideas that directly connect to the network we’re building. The first is we’re in a time when innovation in technology seems like it’s moving so quickly. but I have to ask where is the innovation in the institutions that will guide what the future of AI looks like? And I think there is a matter of timing that’s quite interesting. In many ways it feels like no country is as far ahead on this institutional work as they might hope but neither is any country so far behind that they feel like they’re totally out of the race.

This network gives us an ability to build the institutions that will guide what the AI future looks like. And in that I think is the second opportunity. When we begin to think about what it will look like to build collaboration across countries, across sectors, across topics, I think it’s fair to say that we will not look to the private sector to define that conversation for us. It will require a different model. One that brings governments to play to set policy that allows us to collaborate with the sharing of data. With the idea that compute, even as much as we want to talk about it being sovereign, will have regional centers of excellence and that we need to build ways to collaborate around how we can collaborate.

And I think that’s why we share those resources. resources, that talent flows in this modern world, and that we need the institutions that will let us share our best practices. And third, and maybe most importantly, at a time when AI governance is the topic of the moment and everybody has a new framework, a framework that’s grounded in deep process and practice but still exists only as a framework, we need the institutions that will turn frameworks into practice, that’ll build the muscle memory of collaboration, that’ll actually tell us what it looks like to sit down and negotiate the complexity of ensuring common cyber defense, of sharing data, of building algorithms around agricultural practices that transcend geographies and local weather patterns, that allow us to abstract the underlying knowledge that drives these algorithmic designs and make sure that we can apply them in each place as needed.

That governance is a matter of muscle memory. It’s a matter of practice and it’s a matter of choice. Now, these are three observations that guide why we came to the original idea of creating this network to begin with. I want to acknowledge my colleagues here in the front row from the UN Secretary General’s high -level advisory body, a group that came together with scientific expertise and policy expertise from around the world to set forward a set of recommendations that didn’t just focus on capacity building, but also on the frameworks of global governance at scale. And I want to acknowledge the countries that led on the Global Digital Compact, the first new major multilateral institutional framework for how we might think about issues of interconnectedness in a digital world.

And I want to acknowledge the countries that came forward to really put this initiative together, starting first, of course, with our dear friends from Saudi Arabia and from Kenya, with the incredible work of India here and Senegal and the work that will continue. But I want to acknowledge that even when it often feels like this work happens in abstraction, that it happens in international agreements, in national coordination, at the heart of where this work happens is in the digital world. And I want to acknowledge the people, the scientists, the people that are involved in the civil society advocates, the private sector entrepreneurs who are building this at scale. And so let me conclude then on this point, that even as we come to the end of this incredible summit, as we’ve heard from so many, as we’ve heard both proclamations from the stage, and maybe more quietly, behind closed doors, the work that’s happening when people come together to ask a simple question, how can I help?

How can I be involved? That we ensure that we open the doors of transparency, that we allow for participatory mechanisms, that we ensure that we hold not just our values around what technology should look like, but what our society should look like as it enables these technologies. That we continue to enforce a basic adherence to questions like, are we ensuring diversity in participation? Are we ensuring that the next time we hold a conversation like this, we’ll see an equal number of men and women leading centers around the world on AI? That the students who are represented at institutions like this, show a diversity of thought. That we’re ensuring that we’re investing in the rights and norms and values and principles that should guide international collaboration.

And that the centers like the ones that are represented here today will be the vanguard of a global network that sits above and beyond where private sector innovation and frontier models sits, but rather innovates towards the kind of society that we all aspire to. One where these tools are used to enable our common purpose. One where India leads, but so too does Senegal and Kenya. So does Trinidad. So does Chad. So does the United States. And so does Saudi Arabia, a world where we come together to define what our common vision might look like when AI enables our very best. I want to thank you all. I want to thank the incredible center chairs that we had.

And I want to see us all come together in this work. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Govan, for those powerful reflections, particularly emphasizing the need for diversity in participation. I’m now very excited to announce our final speaker, Her Excellency, Ms. Anne Melgaard, the tech ambassador from Denmark. But I also would like to make a short announcement that there will be a short intervention after this by the International Center for Global Innovation. Ambassador for Technology and Innovation from the Government of Brazil, Mr. Eugenio Garcia as well. so but please my honor to welcome miss Melgar

good afternoon everyone Vilas you’re such a hard act to follow I love this idea of Muslim memory let me congratulate the four gentlemen that was on the stage before I am so impressed and I’m almost a little scared at the scale of the progress that you have already created with this network in such a short amount of time in my home region in the European Union and in Europe it would take a little longer for us before we find the format and the framework and then we make it into London maybe in a few years would actually be able to do what you’ve been doing in such a short amount of time congratulations the global digital divide we’ve been speaking lengthy about it this last week it is still a huge challenge and to the global dissemination to a true democratization of this technology of a meaningful axis around AI when 34 countries are in the global digital divide we are able to do what you have been doing and we are able to do what you have been doing and we are able to do what you have been you have been doing and we are able to do what you have been doing and we are able to are the only ones that have the world’s compute, it becomes really, really challenging.

But what I think this network is doing, it is shining a light that goes beyond these traditional divides that we see in the infrastructure. It is around upskilling and reskilling. And I actually believe that we have more in common between the global north and the global south. And I think we can learn a lot more from each other when it comes to upskilling and reskilling. And that’s why this network is such an important and I think landmark piece for the AI puzzle to be solved. I want to end, I want to make this short, and I want to end on why I think this is important. A dear friend of mine, he has a framework for talking about meaningful coexistence with technology.

And it requires four things, four ingredients. First of all, identity. How to remain human in a technological world. It seems like a stupid, obvious question, right? But I think many of us are feeling the sense that I’m losing a little bit. that we need to be more inclusive. And I think that’s why I’m saying that we need to be more inclusive. me being a human being. My identity as an individual, as a Dane, as a woman, whatever your identity might be in a world where technology is taking over, how to make that persistent, that we have that sense of identity. That is part of being skilled to take the right decisions. The second one is around community.

In a time of increasing technology, we need more community, not less. This gathering could have been a Zoom meeting, but nevertheless, thousands of us travel from all over the world, spending time in here with too much air conditioning and out in traffic with too much traffic. Why? Because of the human connection. Because of the impromptu meeting, the inspiring speeches, but also the people you meet when you’re in the coffee line. Those who are inspiring, and that community is being built, and that’s why these AI summits work. That’s why the communities that we’re part of, they cannot be solely put together. They need to be put into a digital world. They need to present. Then there’s agency.

In a more agentech world, we need more agency, not less. I think many of the people that you meet, maybe your families, your communities, the citizens that you represent, if you’re a lawmaker and policymaker, the feel of agency, of actually having a say in how this is unfolding, is minimized. And this is another place where reskilling, skilling comes up, having the right tools to be part of that. And then finally, about purpose. How often do we ask ourselves, what is the purpose of this technology? There’s a sense that I would love for the AI to empty the dishwasher while I write poetry and I play with my kids. But right now, we’re in a trajectory where I am emptying the dishwasher while the AI is playing with my kids and writing poetry.

If we do not insist on having the questions around, what is the purpose of that technology? And if we do not skill our citizens, ourselves, in being able to ask, what do we collectively want? What do we want out of this technology? We’re going to get technology that we serve. the other way around. And so congratulations on this incredible network. I hope to be a stronger partner of it, but right now you are shining a light on necessary peace for a more meaningful coexistence with technology. Thank you.

Thank you, Excellency, and it’s always a pleasure to see a woman in the room speaking on this subject. I’d now like to request Ambassador Garcia to quickly make his intervention. Thank you.

Thank you. I’ll be very brief since I was not in the program, but just to say that Brazil fully supports this global network of the United Nations on capacity on AI and capacity building. I think it’s very well known and remembered yesterday. President Lula from Brazil. He mentioned specifically in his statement that the role of tonight’s nations is key for an international governance of AI and we need to come to the defense of the multilateral system. It is important that we can we do this together so we’ll be working. We have two institutions, two universities from Brazil. They are already joining this network. One from the northeast of Brazil, Federal University of Pernambuco and also from the south in Brazil which the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

So these two institutions are already collaborating with the network. Of course maybe in the future others could also join but just to say that this network will complement very well. the AI track of the Global Digital Compact, both the scientific panel and the global dialogue. And I think if we can strengthen multilateralism, I think that’s the way to go, and we can count on our support. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Ambassador. In the interest of time, I’d just like to thank the speakers, the panelists, and the audience. I hope they enjoyed this insightful session, and we look forward to more news on this network. And thank you, everyone. We now move on to the next session. Thank you so much. Thank you, speakers. May I remind the audience that we now have with us Sri A. Raven Threaty, the Honorable Chief Minister of Telangana, for a session on Harnessing AI Power in the State’s Growth, a keynote address on AI and cybersecurity, we would encourage the audience to please stay back for the session. Thank you. those who choose to leave may please do so through the door on my left.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. this infrastructure right now and closing the gap between commitments and capacity. This is where the real opportunity lives. Moderating today’s session is Ujwal Kumar, founder and CEO of Quantum Alliance and co -founder of Cognosy AI. Quantum Alliance works with universities, industry and governments to get top talent working on the foundational problems beneath AI, from critical minerals to energy to semiconductors. He will be joined by Tuan Ho, Unicorn founder turned venture capitalist, now partner at X Fund. Jeff Binder, serial entrepreneur with multiple Fortune 500 exits, now at Harvard Venture Partners. Prince Thavan, IAS officer and executive director at REC Limited under the Ministry of Power. Rushali Gaut, global director of climate operations at Google.

Dr. Tobias Helbig, V .I. and VP of Innovation at NXP Semiconductors. Ujwal, over to you. We’ll start with a quick picture for the panelists if you can all rise Thank you

Thank you everyone We are up against Jan, we are up against her boss. So, but, let’s have fun in this panel. And the broader idea, like we have been hearing all about AI models, what AI can do, and this panel is more about, we are talking about AI at scale now, what it needs, what it would make fulfill when we talk about AI, like AI -driven companies, when we are talking about AI -driven solutions. Let’s talk about this now, as AI is forcing creative destruction of how the world builds infrastructure, energy, semiconductors, critical minerals, physical edge systems, data center. US and India are now building this together, rare earth corridors in India’s union budget. Google committed $15 billion to India and accelerated focus on clean energy.

Jensen at Davos called this the largest infrastructure build -out in human history. Two weeks ago, 54 countries launched FORGE, the first global framework for the minerals that power AI. Yesterday, on this very summit, Sundar Pichai laid out Google’s $15 billion commitment to India, a gigawatt -scale AI hub in Vizag, four new subsea cables between US and India. The models are getting attention, the infrastructure is getting the money, and we exactly have the right people to figure out where is all this going and what do we need further. Thank you. To start with, XFund was the early investor in Vulcan Elements. Now it is backed by 1 .4 billion US dollar government partnership to bring America’s rare earth magnet supply chain.

What, according to you, the US -India critical minerals corridor look like from the investor side?

First off, thank you for having us here. I’m really glad you pulled this panel together. I think your points earlier about the focus that we tend to put on discussing AI models and everything in the model layer, but we don’t really talk about what exists underneath that, is actually a really unique topic to cover and one that I and XFund, has generally been extremely excited about. so the way I look at that is that in this strive that we have to build intelligence we tend to talk a lot about the industrial revolution that it will create we often have to understand we often look at the industrial revolution that will be required in order to support the creation of that infrastructure there are a lot of inputs required for AI infrastructure so you’ve got energy you’ve got energy the power grid, power generation has to be clean, sustainable, renewable and the demands for AI infrastructure are going to require us to really solve large problems as to how to supply that power you’ve got, everybody’s talking about critical minerals now you mentioned Vulcan elements right You know, Vulcan Elements was a business that we invested in.

It was a Navy veteran out of Harvard who had spent a lot of time looking at supply chain issues for the U .S. military and noted that, you know, 95, over 90 % of, you know, magnets, rare earth magnets were coming through China. It creates a strategic vulnerability for the United States. And the reason why it creates a vulnerability is because, if you think about it, there are so many things that we need, that we build that require magnets. You can’t build hard drives. You can’t build motors. You can’t, I mean, nothing that moves can be built without them. We talk a lot about chips. You can’t manufacture chips without magnets. And so I look at, you know, problems like that, and for the first time, you know, I’m not going to be able to build a magnet.

I think you’ve got guys like me, venture capitalists, looking at… the opportunity to invest in building up that type of infrastructure to solve those sorts of problems. But that’s just one, right? You have to figure out how do you source it? Where do you get the materials from? And so when you look at things happening on the geopolitical scale, for the first time we are, at least in the United States, we’re looking at these trade deals to try to figure out where we’re going to supply the materials. Like how are we going to completely rebuild our power grid? How are we going to build up the capacity for refining those materials? Where are we going to source them from?

Where are we going to have to get them from? As we’re looking at data centers, how can we make them more sustainable, more power efficient? In order to support the AI needs that we have right now, like power consumption for data infrastructure, infrastructure is already, I think it’s about… It’s approaching 10 % plus. How are you going to meet that demand? And so from an investor perspective, yeah, we’re going to look at all of the cool AI products that entrepreneurs are looking to build. But on the other side, what is very exciting for us is looking at all the low -hanging fruit that exists for all of the inputs of industries that have not been innovated in for decades.

Power grids that have not been upgraded for the better part of a century. It creates huge opportunity for us as investors. And you mentioned US -India. Yeah. I… I find a lot of opportunity in the U .S. and India working more closely together to try to figure out how on both sides of the world we can build great companies to meet that need.

Thanks, John. You spoke about needs. You spoke about the innovation. You spoke about what the early stage startups should be focusing on. I’ll move to Jeff, who has built companies from scratch and made multiple Fortune 500 exits. I would ask him what would it need for young entrepreneurs to build and scale in this space and do it successfully.

Thank you for having us and putting this together. I know that we have more people here than Sundar has at his keynote. So I heard Sam Altman only had 10 yesterday, so we’ve already outdone him. So, you know, I think it’s such an interesting time. I was there in the early web days in 99 and 2000 and 2001, and, you know, the excitement around the Internet obviously fueled a massive tech boom. And ultimately a fiber build -out, an infrastructure build -out, and it took years for all of that infrastructure to be absorbed, and ultimately it was. I think the difference this time around is that the tool sets themselves that entrepreneurs have available to them are smart. And they can bridge some of the challenges, especially since we’re talking about partnerships between the U .S.

and India. But, you know, oftentimes, especially when you get to things like user interfaces, there are cultural differences from the development work that would happen in India for an Indian audience or the U .S. or China. That’s always made it more difficult for collaboration, sort of on the front end. And many of the products that entrepreneurs are working on are often, you know, front end facing, consumer facing, at least initially. They’re generally not building a lot of B2B platforms. That happens later when you get the experience as to what’s necessary in a business environment. And I think that AI is going to change drastically the ability to leverage sort of cross -border talent, in particular with India and China and other places that were harder to leverage before.

It’s certainly from a quality perspective, SQA and back -end development, I think entrepreneurs have been able to leverage India and other places for the last couple decades. But it’s been harder to get the front end of a product to sort of match the cultural necessity of a given market. And I think that’s going to change. And I think for entrepreneurs, it means that they have a massive amount of leverage that they didn’t have before. And it means that we’re going to have a flood of new ideas that are actually brought to market and work fairly well and allow entrepreneurs to deliver products with probably a tenth the capital, depending on the product, obviously. If you’re doing magnets, you’re sort of stuck with the physical properties and refining and some of the things that you can’t do from an IT perspective.

But. I think for entrepreneurs, it’s an extraordinary opportunity. And those that will win. in my mind over the next few years are going to be the ones that leverage the tools most quickly because it’s not possible any longer to develop in the way that people were developing two or three years ago. If you do that, you’re going to be way late. And so now it’s about not so much your product, but learning what the state of the art is, which is literally changing every day in AI. And it’s a golden age, I think, for entrepreneurs. I think it’s going to be much, much more difficult for investors as an environment because the wealth of ideas are going to get much further along.

And that makes it more difficult, not less difficult, I think, to be an investor because you have more mature products. The entrepreneurs are going to be more mature and the entrepreneurs will have more leverage. And they may be able to make it to market much earlier than they would have otherwise, which means where they might have gone for a second round of seed capital, they may be able to get to market and be into revenue with a single small round of seed capital or no seed capital. And that makes that whole early, early stage ecosystem of angel and venture investing much more challenging. And so I think it’s just a great time. I do think that there’s a huge risk, and I don’t think it affects entrepreneurs or young entrepreneurs, but I do think there’s a huge risk of an overbuild.

It feels a lot like the leverage in terms of optimizing hardware and infrastructure is only going to get better, and it’s potentially going to leave us with actually a – I know right now we’re worried about power, we’re worried about compute, we’re worried about data centers, but I would project if we sat here two years from now, will be looking at a grand overbuild with a real challenge around ROI and how to make all these investments work. And so that’s going to be another positive for the entrepreneur because those resources are going to become very inexpensive relative to even what they are today. And so in that sense, I think it’s a great day for young entrepreneurs.

Thanks, Jeff. Jeff, picking up from you about leaving from some of the AI tools, going to market faster, build out, ROIs, now we move to the right time, actually, when you spoke about ROIs. One of the things I was very curious about, all the world leaders coming here and putting a big bet on India. So, like, we just heard Sundar yesterday talking about $15 billion. New C cables between, like, with India. new innovation hubs. Rosalie, you are leading the clean energy transition with Google. I wanted to understand what Google’s, AI’s scale demand basically in terms of energy and why you are placing such heavy weight on India.

Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you all for joining and I appreciate it. I am being pitched against my boss, so I’m going to try and keep it as entertaining and as nice and valuable as I can. That’s a very interesting question in terms of the scale and why India. But I’ll build on a few things that both of you spoke about. One of the interesting things about this particular AI innovation timeframe you’re looking at is it’s what I call across the full stack. So you’re looking at a lot of things that are happening, which typically we talk about software, AI models, applications. That’s the shiny objects everybody talks about and very exciting. But then the amount of work that’s happening on underneath that, which is why I love this session, too, is beneath the AI.

The physical infrastructure layer of it is fascinating. And that goes from everything from the foundational layer that you’re talking about, which is your materials, your data center construction, your access to energy, to water, to all those foundations. So then how do you construct things the right way? We forget about the physical. These are all buildings, quite a few of them. How do you construct them the right way? And then how do you operate them the right way? And then the use of that. And so what we are seeing is just tremendous value and innovation across the entire stack of AI. Which I. Which I, as an engineer, find very, very fascinating. So in terms of Google, I think the.

The privilege and responsibility that Google has is how do we bring about the most value across that full stack, both from a business perspective but also from the impact perspective. And so a lot of the investments you’re seeing, you’re seeing across those pieces, right? So if you walked across this summit, you would hear different pieces of it. Our expo was mostly featured on the product side, so AI for education, AI for healthcare, AI for agriculture. Culture, how do you use AI in domains, contextualize it, and all of that has a layer of a country and where that context is. And then the announcements you talked about were a lot more on the physical side. So it’s what’s required for data centers.

You need good design, good builds, but then you also need network. And so the sub -C cable announcement is part of that. And if you read a little bit, it’s fascinating. It’s an India -America connection, but it goes one way we are building is across Africa. So that’s a big reason. It’s a big reason to bring on board. And then the other way it goes from Singapore and Australia. So it’s a fascinating network, which, again, you can only build data centers, but what’s the point if you can’t actually use it and network and bring them closer to wherever the edge cases are? So super excited about those pieces. Now going to your point about why India.

So why not India, I think, is what I would start with. But most people know it’s a billion -plus user. It’s a great growth market. It’s a lot of young population who we think are going to be the frontier of the growth. It’s a lot of population who also is very eager about tech and tech adaptation. So if you think about what happened with fintech and the phones and digital tech, a lot of the APAC countries, Asia and Global South, jumped ahead. I see people who didn’t even have credit cards. Now everybody uses GPay and UPI and all of those, right? So there’s a whole revolution where you can skip and build. And I think that’s another big exciting part of investing in India is can a generation of innovators come up?

Who don’t have the linear growth that we’ve seen in other regions but can leapfrog it? and I from an operational perspective feel super excited the same way about clean energy you can talk a little bit more Prince about that but India is one of the fewer places where the math on clean energy just works there’s growth, so there’s tremendous demand, lots of solar wind potential tremendous research going on in battery long duration storage, good policies and then the biggest issue what we’ve seen in the US is grid but they’re trying to build a high frequency grid which is fabulous, which then you bring in the innovation on that layer and that’s the unblock and if only you could solve permitting issues then you’re solving the whole stack that’s the excitement, it’s where the math works where the business case works, where you’ve got the talent and the innovation potential and then you also have the users

wow, that’s amazing I do understand now thank you Thanks. So moving from that side, we heard about the demand side, and I’d love to take the insights from Prince, who is actually building the digital public infrastructure for the power sector, and they have been doing some incredible work, which I’ve seen in the past few weeks, particularly about P2P trading. And Prince, with all the initiatives about grid reforms and the trading platform which you are launching at this summit, how do you think the AI’s energy demand is going? How are you supporting it? Your insights.

Thank you. Thank you, Joel. Thank you, everybody, for being here this morning. Let me first start by putting the AI. Thank you. compute demand in context. I honestly, resonating from what Duan had also said in his remarks, I feel that AI essentially will not scale unless your power is programmable. Okay, and that is, so the AI, I would say, I don’t want to call it race, but the AI build will depend a lot on, not on chips, as we might think. We do have the capacity and capability world over to solve that problem. But I think the binding constraint would be grids. It would be how intelligent and resilient your grids are. And I believe that is where, what is going to define the development of most of the compute infrastructure.

Now, what, India has essentially started doing is, we are redefining the architecture. Okay, so we are redefining how we view the grid. India already has one nation, one grid, which is essentially meaning one frequency. And now we are also having one digital interoperable layer that is being brought in by the India energy stack. So what does this mean? What does the stack essentially do? So the India energy stack, it basically creates the interoperable rails for systems to interact with each other. If you have a data center, it is not just creating high demand, but it is creating high peak demand that needs the grid to respond. And that is where you need coordination at scale.

So what is going to be scarce in the times to come is not electrification, as Roshani said. We have enough math works when you talk about solar power, when you talk about wind, even hydro. So that is where the math does work. But what needs to be ensured is coordination at scale. And that is what the India Energy Stack is essentially doing by laying down those foundational building blocks. Now, what we started with was a first showcase of how you can use the stack to essentially source energy from distributed energy resources like the solar rooftop panels, which we have on top of our households. We can literally transact in energy the same way that we transact using GPay, UPI payments.

Or using other such applications, Paytm, PhonePay, etc. So similarly, just imagine. that the data center, instead of relying on long -term PPAs and then hoping that the grid will deliver, can essentially source its power from millions of such distributed rooftop assets dynamically at scale. Just imagine the power of that happening. So it can literally be generating livelihoods for a lot of people who may not even be in geographical proximity to the data center. So individual retail households can essentially monetize their rooftop solar power by supplying to such data centers. How does the stack enable it? The stack lays down standard rules for measurement, identification, and settlement all in near real -time. So that’s how the architecture of the grid itself is changing.

let me the grid evolves generally in decades as to one said we have not invested heavily in the grids world over might be that China is an exception there but India has started doing the plumbing work it has started doing the hard work on that layer and generally AI evolves in quarters but the grid would evolve in decades how would you keep pace right and so that is where the India energy stack comes in where we push that development frontier and we enable people to talk to each other on the grid so AI would need not just electrons not just chips not just electrons it actually needs intelligent electrons and that is where the India energy stack sits in I think that should be in the times to come one of another reasons beyond economics that companies like Google or other companies would take bets on India.

And let me also tell you, you did recount Sundar’s message about $15 billion, but there’s also Reliance’s message about a trillion dollars in the next seven years. So let’s not forget that as well. I’m just putting stuff in context.

Two minutes to one. li

ke India. And by the way, India is very, very well represented in Cambridge, which is how I probably met half the people on this panel. But it really does create these global scale opportunities to reinvent, to create this other, to support this other industrial revolution beyond just what the AI and the intelligence is allowing us to do. T

hanks, Juan. Yeah, that’s exciting. Now with that, we want to move to Dr. Tobias. We have been talking about physical layer infrastructure. He has been working in semiconductor innovation since last 20 years, building it across US, Europe, India. I wanted to ask him, what does the next innovation looks like to you? Or what are you working on at this point? Where are you placing? your bet.

Yeah, thank you very much for the question. Thank you so much for having me here. It’s great. And I would like to build a little bit, Jeff, on what you said earlier where you had this, are we on the right track? What the heck are we doing? And let’s zoom out for a moment. 1942, the head of IBM made a statement. There’s a world market for about five computers. And he was right, given the kind of computers he was looking at. We know better now, some years later, there’s laptops, PCs, there’s mobile phones, there’s basically a computer in every device. There’s billions of computers. Now what we discuss is, hey, AI, huge disruption. Power hungry like hell.

Shall we build some new computers? Shall we build power plants? Or how do we run it with renewable energy? and I get this nagging feeling is this really it or are we missing what came after these five computers in what we’re discussing if I take benchmarks like here’s my brain and it takes 20 watts there’s a fly which is a pretty agile intelligent robot below a milliwatt there’s something there’s something which is going to happen which is different than what we’re discussing here at the moment and that is what’s driving us as a semiconductor company in building on what starts now and driving it out into the real world so we today have products where on whatever 10 watts or so you can run very meaningful LLMs you can interact, you can drive the intelligent into the edge, into our real world that goes hand in hand with what’s happening around here moving from, hey, I can perceive something, is it a dog, a cat, to I can think, generative AI, I can create something out of those models to the point that I can create agents, stuff which acts on my behalf out there in the real field, which drives the intelligence and this disruption you’re looking at here at the moment and which is driving all these conversations, drives it close to us into the real world to the point that these devices, these robots, these whatever you want to call it, they’ll be able to learn.

So what we discuss here, and this is a huge challenge, I totally agree with all statements made before, we’ll see a next phase. It will see this moving into the real world, moving close to me, moving into autonomous systems, which ultimately change my life and change industries. And there is this second wave building up and my expectation, to some extent my hope, is from now on, where we sit as a company, is that this huge thing you’re already discussing with data centers is the five computers. And what is coming is these billions of edge devices which we will also see in the AI space. And just giving an example, I’m running marathons with a watch with me.

I charged it before I left in Germany and it still stays 12 days battery power. And there’s a lot of intelligence in that watch. This is where we are going. So the one is feed the beast and make it happen. The second is avoid that the beast is hungry and look at totally different models which will come in the next phase. Thank you.

This is very interesting. Now we are talking about taking AI out of data center now. Any comments from the fellow panelists?

I agree with him. I think that the IBM analogies are very good. Very good one. I think we are all focused on the core and centralization. And as we’ve seen in many markets, they move from centralization to decentralization to hybrid approaches. And so that’s, I think, an incredibly astute observation. I do think edge devices ultimately have to be the core component in the full proliferation of AI. And so that means that, you know, as he said, small amounts of power can generate lots of value. It doesn’t necessarily have to be tokens in the center of a data center. So that goes to my concern that I think that – and look, I think all of the resources that are being built will eventually be consumed.

That’s not a – that’s a given. It’s a question of when and what – on what ROI they’ll deliver as they’re being – being consumed and used. And I think that’s a huge risk because – agents at the edge, which are probably going to end up being in the end a much more likely modality a decade from now. And it’ll be interesting to watch for sure.

Okay. I do have a small – and I completely agree, actually. That’s truly, as Jeff said, it was an absolutely astute observation. But you know where you can see this being played out in practice even today? And that’s when you talk about finance. Okay. So finance world knows this. So today, because I work for a non -banking financial company, and one of our main products is infrastructure financing, where data centers are a product that we finance. And Roshali was in a panel discussion that spoke about the trifecta of AI energy and finance. But you know the finance bros, they have figured it out because today if you go for financing of a data center, you won’t get debt financing for GPUs.

GPUs are mostly financed by equity because there is obsolescence risk in GPUs. You would get debt financing for the brake motor, maybe even for sourcing power, but you won’t get debt financing for GPUs. And there you have it because they are seeing the big picture being played out there. So completely on board there, yes.

Again, Rukhsani has been…

No, no, no, I’m good.

No, no, no. We want to hear from you. Please, go ahead.

No, I think the risk of strata assets, the way you said, and the ROI is real, like in a sense of where you’re investing and what. But I think your point is very astute. There are portions of this will be obsolete. There are portions of this which will be very easily replaced, whether it’s on the chip side or whether how you write the programs. Even the models, right? You went from large scale, smaller. How do you build them? but also what I’m hoping is the bets on some of the hard infrastructure are just good things to do like I think to me the fact that we are seeing a transition to renewables or seeing a transition of the grids being operated in a better way, some of the boring bits that people didn’t pay attention to is how do you run things efficiently those I think are good pieces of this and then it goes to you right size it, we’ll get over the FOMO and the extra investments and it’ll probably get right sized into where in the stack you really want to invest with the ROI

Thank you, so with this I’d like to take it a little bit more deeper, like we spoke about some of the opportunities we agree on something we may not on some Tuan, you invest early on founders I wanted to check with you and understand with you how do you, can you tell us that is there a mismatch between what is getting funded and what needs to be funded?

That’s a good question. Is there a mismatch between what’s getting funded and what needs to be funded? Well, I mean, probably. Yeah, I mean, I think, well, okay, going to the theme of this, I think there is more likely to be a mismatch between what is getting funded in the sort of like the pure AI world, if we’re talking about the foundational models. I think, Jeff, I think you had made this comment a little bit earlier. You look at a lot of the AI companies out there, and it’s a little bit like the dot -com era where you’ll see 100 companies, and the reality is that in five years, there will be five of them that are left.

I think one reason why I like focusing on infrastructure -type businesses is because I think… I think there’s more durability. and clarity to exactly what the problems are that you’re trying to solve. I mean, every great startup begins with a really well -understood problem and a product, what they call a product -market fit, like a founder that’s able to build a great solution to that problem that has some sort of market validation in need. And what I find really exciting about infrastructure businesses is I think the problems are a lot clearer in terms of what you’re trying to solve. To your point, there’s a lot more risk in the GPUs. There’s a lot more risk in the models that you’re building, that you’re building around them.

And the reality, too, is that those things are also going to change a lot faster. I mean, if you look at a data center, as an example, a data center ultimately is a giant box that provides a lot of power at scale and it needs to be able to efficiently… efficiently cool what’s inside it. of it. In terms of what GPUs or compute you put inside, I mean, that can change over many, many generations. But the utility of the infrastructure you’ve built there will always have value. So, I don’t know if that answers your question.

To add to that, I think that if you look at the dot -com era, measuring, with the exception of hardware companies, which were in switches like Cisco and other players, it was very difficult to determine whether a product was good or not. For those who remember MySpace before Facebook, it looked like MySpace was going to own the social media space. Of course, most, half the people in here probably don’t even know who MySpace is. It’s much different now. There’s a measurability component in all aspects of AI that didn’t exist in the dot -com era. You know, you had commerce platforms, but it wasn’t clear what made one commerce platform better than another. The consumer would ultimately decide that over time and through iterations.

And if you remember, Amazon for a long time was known for one -click ordering. Well, none of us really want to do that because we don’t want to make a mistake and find out that we bought the wrong thing. I think now it’s different. Almost every aspect of artificial intelligence deployment from the foundational aspects all the way to the top of the stack are measurable. And so that’s going to make the success and failure of businesses much more clear, much sooner than it was in the case of the Doctomer. And I think that’s going to be ultimately the element that shakes out companies very quickly. And then to the point about obsolescence and GPUs, we don’t know what the hardware roadmaps look like, even inside of a Google or a Jensen’s company, NVIDIA.

Or somebody else that’s out there. And power, which is the fundamental thing I think we’re talking about foundationally. can be grossly disrupted by those advances because if somebody has a breakthrough on chip design that’s now 10 or 50 or 100x what somebody else deployed, their data center is now almost instantly, at least from a financing perspective, obsolete. And so that’s a huge danger, I think, for investors in those foundational areas.

Thank you. Dr. Tobias, you have also been involved in the innovation ecosystem very strongly. What is your take on this? What are you seeing because you are also involved in India? I’ve seen your company running hackathons and competitions. I’d love to know more from you.

Adding to what just was discussed, we have a tendency to overestimate the next two years and impact and underestimate what’s happening in 10 years. And at the moment, we are going into this with huge bang. which even maybe have these ups and downs things even much bigger. From my perspective, all what we are discussing on AI is absolutely real. This is a huge disruption. This is changing industries. This is changing lives. This is changing professions. Wherever there is data, there is change. And that in the end is driving what we are doing by developing the products we have, which is semiconductors products, by being in India for that since literally decades. Development centers on our DNA history as a company of Motorola, Freescale, NXP, here in the Noida, Delhi region, in Bangalore, and so on.

So very much working on that. And on your question from an innovation perspective, well, we all know the hype cycle. And that’s tough. Because it always means that there is disruption. And there is a trap of disillusionment. And we’ve seen it. for all major breakthroughs, especially when they are being hyped up like hell. There’s the self -driving cars. There’s other things. In the end, these things get real. They have the substance. They happen, and they transform things. And AI will. The way there, and also in the question, hey, what’s the risk? What’s the bad, and what’s coming from the sidelines? I think we will see still troughs of disillusionments and surprises. There was one some while ago when this wave had a deep -seating moment.

Such moments will come again. And there will be a recovery from that, I’m also sure. So I’m in innovation since literally decades. I love it. It’s a roller coaster. We overestimate, we get shocked, and we get it right.

Thank you. With that, I’ll go to Sari. I was very excited when I saw Google Logo launching Google Climate Technology Center. Okay. And I would like you to quickly give your insights, like what is it about and what would the innovators be looking for it?

Yes, thank you. So super excited. This week we announced in partnership with the Office of Principal Scientific Advisory for the Government of India, Google’s Center for Climate Tech. So there’s a couple, you know, how did we get here? Because that’s interesting to you is we see a lot of innovation. I live in Silicon Valley. I was raised in India, across back and forth. I’ve lived across the world. There’s different innovation which comes from big institutes, big academic settings, big companies. But there’s also innovation that comes from different corners of the world. What we loved about the PSA philosophy was they’re trying to get more Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and also a wider spread of universities and academia that can get involved in this.

So, you know, besides your premier one. So that was very enticing. The other thing is, how do we take innovation down to the root? which I think also helps with some of the hype cycle because you’re making it local and you’re also making contextual to where those cities are. So with that in mind, what our center is looking for, we have a couple big pillars. One is skilling. We think there’s green skilling. A lot of focus on AI skilling, but in terms of green skills, which are decarbonization, clean energy, in terms of just we are looking at materials, chemistry, there’s a lot of new things in those spaces which haven’t been brought into college curriculum or university curriculum.

So we want to build upon that. A lot of the construction and investments are happening in tier two cities, so we think it’s a great way to get a more diverse pool skill in that. So that’s number one pillar. The second one is low carbon materials. So you go to embodied carbon, something you’re all very passionate about. So how do you drive innovation in construction, which is going to be huge? And again, it’s not just data centers. What you learn from data centers can be for real estate, for commercial buildings. So it’s to do with low -carbon steel, low -carbon cement, and low -carbon materials as you see them go through that construction cycle. And the third one we have looked at is right now that we have is sustainable aviation fuel, which is a little different from data centers.

It’s not that, but I think it’s like a good growing area, which we are, again, one of the philosophies we have is where can we find first -of -a -kind pilots and places where we can build, bring the Google brand and innovation. And we think sustainable aviation fuel in a growing country that is like now has one of the fastest growing airports and air traffic, that would be a good one too. And our hope is as we go through this, we are trying to see very outcomes -based, so not pure research, but pilots and actual update.

Thank you. Very quickly, Tuan, do you have any closing 30 seconds?

I was going to say there, one thing that I don’t think we had a chance to do. We didn’t discuss as much, but it is important. especially as we’re at an event like this is government financing. I think what’s really another thing that’s been really exciting about this is having a tech conference like this where you have the Prime Minister and multiple heads of states coming from around the world to say like, these are things that we need to invest in, these are things that we need to support, is I think from a tech VC side of things something that we’re not used to seeing. But I also think it’s very exciting. Both in the United States you’re seeing hundreds of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the federal government into infrastructure.

And you’re seeing similar investments being made in countries like India, countries outside of, China’s been doing this for a while, but you’re seeing this happen around the world. And so yeah, I think, I mean, where are we right now? There is the . industrial, like I said at the beginning, there’s the industrial revolution that AI is ushering in, but there’s also the industrial revolution that the requirements of AI are also going to require or is also going to usher in. So I think it’s going to be a bright future for us all.

Thank you. I think that’s a great closing for us, and I enjoyed talking to all of you. I really had so much fun. Thanks, and your insights are amazing. Hopefully the innovators looking here, they got something out of it, and we’ll see some new people coming to all of us doing the innovations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.