United Nations: The AI Impact Summit that India will host early next year will serve as a platform to commit to shared solutions and enable the Global South to actively shape the Artificial Intelligence agenda, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada said here.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will attend the India–AI Impact Summit 2026 that will be held on February 19-20 in New Delhi.
This will be the first time an AI summit will be hosted in the Global South, following similar Global AI Summits in Bletchley Park (UK), Seoul and Paris.
“This is not symbolic. It’s substantive,” Prasada said Tuesday in his remarks at a special curtain-raiser event organised in the UN Headquarters by the Permanent Missions of India and France to the United Nations.
He said that emerging and developing economies will account for the majority of future AI users, data generation and real-world deployment scenarios. “Their needs, constraints and innovations must therefore shape the global AI ecosystem,” Prasada said.
“India sees the AI Impact Summit not as an endpoint, but as a platform. One that brings together governments, industry, researchers, civil society and international organisations to commit to shared solutions and sustained collaboration, a place where the Global South is not merely discussed but actively shapes the global AI agenda,” Prasada said as he extended an invitation to all stakeholders to participate in the New Delhi summit.
The India–AI Impact Summit 2026 is anchored in the principles of People, Planet and Progress, and envisions a “future where AI advances humanity, fosters inclusive growth, and safeguards our shared planet.”
Prasada emphasised that lessons from India’s own digital transformation journey are clear. “Technology achieves its greatest value when it is inclusive by design, open by default, and trusted by citizens.”
Addressing UN officials, envoys, civil society members and other stakeholders at the curtain-raiser event, Prasada said that the AI Summit is being structured around the idea of translation – from vision to execution.
He said that the three foundational pillars of People, Planet and Progress will guide our approach.
“It will focus on seven areas of cooperation, from human capital and social inclusion to safe AI, resilience, scientific collaboration, equitable access and scaling AI for economic growth and public good,” he said, adding that the emphasis throughout will be “practical: what works, what scales, and what delivers results.”
A concept note released for the event said that the AI Action Summit held in Paris on February 10-11 this year marked a key moment in global cooperation on inclusive, open and sustainable AI deployment for people and the planet. The upcoming AI Impact Summit in Delhi will build on commitments to deliver further measurable outcomes and impact-driven applications.
Clara Chappaz, Ambassador for AI and Digital, France, addressing the event, said that the summit in India will be a “key moment” for moving from action to impact and added that Paris is working closely with New Delhi to prepare for the summit, notably through its co-chairmanship of the working group on resilience, innovation and efficiency.
Under-Secretary-General and the United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh Gill said that Guterres would be attending the summit in India on behalf of the UN system.
“We are working closely with the Indian Government to ensure a successful AI Impact summit” that builds on its previous editions, he said, expressing confidence that the India Summit will be a crucial platform for accelerating progress on various fronts.
Gill stressed that the UN is committed to translating the event’s title, ‘From Action to Impact,’ to reality.
“Promoting AI for humanity and creating global spaces for dialogue on how AI is governed has been at the core of the Secretary General’s agenda. The lessons from previous technological waves and trans-boundary phenomena – from nuclear energy to pandemics to social media – all point us to the same conclusion: the benefits from AI are potentially too transformative and its risks too far reaching to postpone international cooperation,” Gill said.
He pointed out that Guterres, in his 2020 roadmap for digital cooperation, had noted the lack of representation and inclusiveness in global discussions where developing countries are largely absent or not well represented in the most prominent forums on AI.
“So, five years since the roadmap, we are on the eve of the first AI Summit hosted by a developing country,” Gill said.
