India AI Summit 2026

In February 2026, I was at the India AI Summit in New Delhi. Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Nandan Nilekani, Vinod Khosla, Alexander Wang, senior IAS officers, ministry secretaries, NITI Aayog members, and founders building for India. All in the same room.

This was not a tech conference where policy is an afterthought. The Digital India stack (Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker) already proved what happens when government and technology align. The next wave is AI on top of that stack. And the people making those decisions were sitting right there.

Here are the conversations that stayed with me.

Nandan Nilekani and Demis Hassabis

The most important moment at the summit lasted about ten seconds.

Demis Hassabis was talking about frontier AI capabilities. What the next generation of models could do. Nilekani interrupted him. “No no, we need something a level before that. For people who don’t know how to read and write.”

That one sentence reframed everything. The labs think about reasoning benchmarks. Nilekani thinks about a farmer who cannot read. The gap between what AI labs build and what India actually needs is enormous. And the person who built Aadhaar for 1.4 billion people was the one pointing at it.

That comment changed the direction of what I am building. I am working on AI for education in India, and Nilekani’s insight made the thesis sharper: literacy has to come before AI tutoring. You cannot build an AI tutor for someone who cannot read the screen.

Vinod Khosla

Talking to Vinod Khosla is something I had wanted to do for a long time. He has had a meaningful effect on the direction of my life’s trajectory. I told him I wanted to come back to India and build AI applications here. His response: “You’ve got to find out what you’re passionate about.”

He invited me to think carefully about that decision and was generous with his time regardless of what I decide. That mattered.

Nikesh Arora

Nikesh Arora asked me a question I still sit with: “Do you want to solve a global problem or a local problem? If it’s a global problem, solve it from the best place and go back.”

It is a good question. Education in India is both. The deployment is local, the technology is global. I have not fully resolved it. But the fact that he framed it that cleanly helped.

Vivek Raghavan, Sarvam AI

Vivek Raghavan was genuinely kind and thoughtful. We connected over IIT Delhi. “Aajao, we need people like you.” I can see why Sarvam AI is doing so well. The people building it are the kind of people you want to build with.

Alexander Wang, Scale AI

Met Alexander Wang at the summit. Scale AI’s work on data infrastructure is foundational to how frontier models get built. Seeing the people behind these companies in person is different from reading about them.

What I took away

Every conversation at the summit validated the same thing from a different angle. India’s problems are hard. The scale is massive. The infrastructure to build on, thanks to Aadhaar, UPI, and the broader DPI stack, is better than most outsiders think.

I am going back to India after graduating. The summit did not create that conviction. It made it sharper.