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New Delhi: Positioning Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a key driver of inclusive development, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the IndiaAI Mission, on Tuesday organised the Conference on “AI for All: Driving Equitable Growth and Societal Good.” The event was held as an official pre-summit session ahead of the India-AI Impact Summit 2026.
The conference brought together senior government officials, industry leaders, startups and academia to deliberate on how AI can be deployed at a population scale to deliver real-world impact, bridge digital divides and support India’s transition into an AI-driven economy, while ensuring equity, accessibility and ethical governance remain central to policy and innovation.
Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary, MeitY and CEO, IndiaAI Mission, said the Union Budget 2026 has laid the “foundational rails” for India to become the world’s AI inferencing capital. He highlighted the introduction of an automated, rule-driven Safe Harbour mechanism as a regulatory “masterstroke” that brings clarity, lowers compliance friction and significantly reduces the cost of innovation for the private sector.
“India’s AI journey has now moved beyond pilots and prototypes. The focus is on real-world impact and population-scale deployment across states,” Singh said.
He outlined key pillars of the IndiaAI Mission, including subsidised access to GPUs, development of indigenous foundation models, creation of high-quality datasets through the AIKosh platform, and large-scale job creation. According to him, AI has the potential to generate up to five million jobs and contribute $1 trillion to the economy, while advancing inclusion, sustainability and growth, core themes of the upcoming IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026.
Dr Pallavi Jain Govil, Secretary, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, described AI as a “kinetic enabler” projected to add trillions of dollars to India’s GDP. Referring to the successful partnership between CII and the Ministry during the Y20 engagement, she said the government is now scaling up the IndiaAI Mission to position India as a leading global service provider for Agentic AI.
Flagship initiatives such as MY Bharat and the ₹4,400-crore Khelo India Mission, she noted, are helping democratise sovereign technologies. “From rural sports analytics to grassroots startups, AI is being positioned as an inclusive tool for Viksit Bharat,” Govil said, adding that India’s 42-crore youth population will be central to driving the global digital economy.
Calling for urgent and widespread adoption of AI, Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog and Chief Architect of the NITI Frontier Tech Hub, said infrastructure alone would not unlock AI’s full economic and societal value. “Skilling cannot be a side agenda; it must be the central pillar of the IndiaAI Mission,” she asserted, echoing the Union Budget 2026’s vision of a high-powered education society.
Ghosh stressed that the promise of “AI for All” would only be realised when AI solutions are embedded in the everyday lives of citizens. Highlighting the role of small businesses, she showcased the Dx-EDGE (Digital Excellence for Growth and Enterprise) initiative, supported by the Ministry of MSME and AICTE, as a critical platform to empower India’s MSME ecosystem. By future-proofing enterprises and creating a job-ready workforce, she said, India is positioned to lead the global techade “by choice, not by chance”.
Offering a broader geopolitical perspective, Sudeep Shrivastava, Joint Secretary, MeitY, said the current century belongs to India in the domain of intelligence and technology. Drawing a historical parallel, he remarked that while the 19th century was dominated by the UK and the 20th by the US, the 21st century will be defined by India’s leadership in AI. With India topping global charts in AI skilling and talent production, he said the country is no longer a passive consumer but a key architect of an inclusive, sovereign and ethically grounded AI ecosystem.
Industry leaders echoed the government’s emphasis on infrastructure and inclusion
Ipsita Dasgupta, Chairperson of the CII–HP Centre for AI and Senior Vice President & Managing Director of HP India, said localised data combined with sovereign compute represents India’s new “real economic power”. She welcomed the Union Budget 2026’s focus on AI infrastructure and tax incentives for data centres, which she said would enable a “nation of prompters” to drive global productivity.
Dasgupta highlighted the work of the CII–HP Centre for AI, which has provided foundational AI training to over 10,000 MSMEs across 20 cities, helping bridge the digital divide for small businesses that contribute nearly 40 per cent of India’s GDP. She reaffirmed HP’s commitment to making AI mainstream and inclusive, from metro hubs to Tier-2 and Tier-3 clusters.
From the startup ecosystem’s perspective, Prateek Garg, Chairman of the CII Regional Committee (NR) on Start-ups and Managing Director of Progressive Infotech, thanked the government for its strategic stewardship of the IndiaAI Mission. He said AI skilling is critical to sustaining India’s global competitiveness as the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. Garg emphasised the need for governance-led growth and the adoption of AIOps to solve complex societal challenges at scale, aligning innovation with the principles of People, Planet and Progress.