India AI Impact Summit 2026: $100 Billion in AI Investment and Why It Matters for Enterprise Automation

The fourth global AI summit opened today in New Delhi, and it's the largest one yet. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 runs February 16-20 at Bharat Mandapam, with the official high-level sessions on February 19-20. Over 250,000 people registered. Twenty heads of state confirmed. And nearly every major AI CEO in the world showed up.

This is also the first global AI summit hosted in the Global South. Previous editions in Bletchley (UK), Seoul, and Paris focused heavily on AI safety. India's theme: "welfare for all, happiness for all," organized around People, Planet, and Progress. The shift from safety to impact signals where the global AI conversation is heading, away from hypothetical risk and toward real-world deployment.

Who's in the Room

Sam Altman (OpenAI), Sundar Pichai (Google), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Bill Gates, Mukesh Ambani (Reliance), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Yann LeCun (Meta), and Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm). Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind speaks Thursday. The UK sent Deputy PM David Lammy. French President Macron arrived in Mumbai tonight and joins the summit Thursday. Brazilian President Lula and UN Secretary-General Guterres are also attending.

One notable absence: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pulled out Saturday citing "unforeseen circumstances." Nvidia sent EVP Jay Puri instead but offered no further explanation. Nvidia and Reliance had already announced their AI infrastructure partnership before the summit started.

Day 1 Announcements

Anthropic Opens Bengaluru Office

Anthropic officially launched its first India office in Bengaluru (its second in Asia after Tokyo). India is now Claude's second-largest market globally. Air India is using Claude Code to build custom software. Cognizant is deploying Claude Code to 350,000 employees globally to modernize legacy systems.

Dario Amodei said: "India's adoption is even more extreme compared with the rest of the world."

Microsoft's "Unbundling" Framework

Microsoft India President Puneet Chandok put forward a useful framing at the summit: "AI will not kill jobs. AI will unbundle jobs. Your job is a bundle of tasks. What AI will do is it will unbundle it."

He also cited Microsoft research showing 92% of knowledge workers in India already use AI, with 77% using it daily, and predicted 1,000x growth in the AI sector over the next three years.

India's Sovereign AI Models

Under the IndiaAI Mission (~$1.2 billion over five years, confirmed by India's Press Information Bureau), the government is building its own AI capabilities:

• 12 indigenous foundation models selected from 506 proposals

• Param2 by IIT Bombay's BharatGen consortium: a 17-billion-parameter Mixture of Experts model supporting all 22 of India's scheduled languages. It handles reasoning, math, and code. Backed by Rs 1,200 crore in public funding with partners including IBM, Zoho, and Nasscom

• Specialized models expected to launch: Yukti (reasoning), Varta (conversation), Kavach (safety)

These models are deployed as national public digital goods, meaning government departments, banks, hospitals, courts, and schools can run them locally, even offline. India's bet: you don't need trillion-parameter models if you build specifically for your population.

The Investment Picture

The Indian government is targeting $100 billion in investment proposals across the five-day event. That's a target, not confirmed commitments. But the existing numbers already tell a clear story:

India by the Numbers

Sam Altman revealed that India now has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it the second-largest market after the US and the largest student user base globally. Anthropic confirmed India is also Claude's second-largest market.

Altman called India a potential "full-stack AI leader." Ambani said it will be "one of the biggest intelligence markets." Union Minister Jitin Prasada added that India has "maximum AI skill penetration" and has pursued a policy of "not over-regulating so that innovation thrives."

India's Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran framed it clearly: "India can become the first large society where human abundance and machine intelligence reinforce, and not undermine, each other. The window is still open, but it is not indefinite."

What This Means for Enterprise AI

The India summit isn't about enterprise AI agents specifically. It's about governance, access, and geopolitical positioning. But two announcements from Day 1 connect directly to how AI agents are deployed in enterprises:

Anthropic deploying Claude Code to 350,000 Cognizant employees is agentic automation at production scale. Building custom software for Air India with an AI coding agent is a step beyond chatbots.

Microsoft's "unbundling" framework describes exactly how enterprise AI agents work in practice. AI doesn't replace roles wholesale. It takes over individual tasks within a role, one by one. That's how AI agents handle processes like invoice matching, resume screening, or claims processing, breaking a job into discrete tasks and automating each one.

The $68 billion in committed AI infrastructure, 100 million active users, and 12 sovereign models designed to run offline in hospitals and courts, this is the foundation that production-grade AI systems will run on for the next decade.

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