The Global INDIAai Summit has successfully concluded at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi on July 4, 2024.

All 12 side sessions were organised over the last two days, which were graced by 2,000 global artificial intelligence (AI) experts, policy makers, AI practitioners, industry/startups, and academia. Meanwhile, over 10,000 AI enthusiasts joined the session virtually.  Some additional sessions were held in closed door meetings having delegates and experts of Global Partnership on AI (GPAI). The side sessions were held in public and live streamed for wider participation.

2,000 AI experts and practitioners attended the sessions physically and the virtual participation crossed 10,000. Each session saw in-depth and insightful discussion on several aspects, that included key challenges in implementation, the available western model, India’s unique need in shaping its AI discourse for meeting its domestic demand and for attaining the global AI leadership.

In addition, India set the global discourse by emphasising the intent of the government to democratise AI and make it accessible to all. Further, sessions on the key pillars of INDIAai Mission demonstrated India’s planned action and commitment to build an inclusive and robust AI ecosystem in the country and lead the global AI innovation.

Furthermore, the global south countries acknowledged and appreciated the role of India to give voice to them at the global AI forum and bridge the gap with global north. The convening of Collaborative AI on Global Partnership (CAIGP) brought together GPAI members, AI experts and industry representatives to identify mechanisms to overcome the global AI divide.

Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD/OCDE) and GPAI announced a new integrated partnership on AI. The GPAI members came to a consensus about the future vision of GPAI. Some of the key points for the future vision include:

  • Recognise the transformative potential of AI in shaping the future of our societies and economies.
  • Acknowledge the emerging risks and challenges posed by AI systems.
  • Share a commitment to fostering trustworthy and human-centric AI.
  • Reaffirm the collective commitment to the OECD recommendation on AI and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recommendation on the ethics of AI.
  • Recall that the GPAI has been a unique initiative for global multi stakeholder cooperation on AI.
  • Recognise the New Delhi 2023 GPAI Ministerial Declaration, where GPAI’s unique and independent identity is emphasised as a nodal initiative that plays a key role in global cooperation on AI innovation and governance.

Overall, the summit led to in-depth deliberations and resulted in deep insights on several implementation aspects of INDIAai Mission, that inter-alia includes multi- large language models (LLM) to meet the diverse need of India. In addition, platformisation and standardisation of AI ready data, partner ecosystem and multi-stakeholder approach to implement INDIAai Mission from technology, policy, framework, research, industrial, startup, ethical, youth, business, and academic perspectives, and weaving together the strength of India via its skilled and talent ecosystem, demand ecosystem, researcher, startup and industrial ecosystems.

The brief of sixth side session was held on the topic, empowering talent through AI education and skilling. The discussion covered India’s unique needs and collaboration among industry, public sector and society to build an AI-ready generation in India, emphasising human intelligence to thrive in an AI-driven world. The need for mutual recognition of certifications was also discussed to ensure the effectiveness of training and skill development initiatives across different regions and countries. The importance of curated and age-appropriate AI learning environments was also covered.

Meanwhile the seventh side session was on empowering the global south. It included discussions about the importance of multi-stakeholder dialogue, priority use-cases, compute capacity, open-source technology (tech), AI divide. The global south countries appreciated the efforts of India to mainstream the global south and represent its interest in the global AI forums.

In addition, the ninth session was held on the topic from seed to scale, empowering India’s startup ecosystem. The discussion highlighted the fact that INDIAai Mission has been approved with an outlay of Rs 103.72 billion and out of this, Rs 20 billion would be utilised towards supporting the Indian startup ecosystem to develop indigenous AI based solutions. The support would also include resolution of issues such as compute, dataset and skills and access to graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure would be made available at subsidised rate. Insights revealed that India has a competitive advantage in AI owing to skills, market and demand. For entrepreneurs, the value creation and return on investment over and above cost will be the key catalyst. INDIAai Mission can lower the cost of innovation and indigenous development.

Further, the tenth session was on the data ecosystem. The discussion highlighted the existing legal frameworks in India, and existing dataset platforms maintained by various Ministries of Government and the regulators. Insight was emphasised to focus on who is creating data, who is collecting data and who is driving notional and economical value of data, the individual’s interest and national interest.

Furthermore, eleventh session that took place was on the topic AI competency framework for public sector. The discussion highlighted the existing legal frameworks in India, and existing dataset platforms maintained by various ministries of government and the regulators. The discussion dwelt on covering the population such as deep skilling are imparted to some researchers, application skills for many such as developers and basic skills for everyone. National Education Policy and Global Skill Comparison Framework were also discussed. UNESCO’s ongoing work on AI competency was covered. The aspects of functional competency, domain competency and application competency were also discussed.

Moreover, the last session was on sustainable agriculture.  The discussion covered the India’s AgriStack, use of AI in various countries, data driven credit disbursement to farmers and lending of micro-credit up-to $ 10 (roughly Rs 800), the timeliness of agri information collection and timely action with respect to pre-harvest, harvest, and post-harvest activities.