AI Impact Summit: AI to be integral to Airtel business, says Sunil Mittal
Bharti Enterprises chairman says AI will power Airtel's operations and security focus, as leaders at India AI Impact Summit discuss open standards and frugal innovation
 "AI Impact Summit: AI to be integral to Airtel business, says Sunil Mittal")
Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal said artificial intelligence (AI) will become an integral part of Airtel's business and operations, even as he emphasized on India's abilities of frugal innovation using AI. Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in conversation with Shantanu Narayen CEO of Adobe Systems in a fireside chat, he noted that AI will not only be used for healthcare, education, deep research, and medical sciences, but to also ensure security of the country's citizens.
"To secure our citizens, I think that will be our focus, and AI will be used immensely in that area. Of course, we can also talk about healthcare, education, deep research, and medical sciences. I think all those areas will flourish on the back of this. From our company’s standpoint, AI is becoming a really integral part of how we operate, serve our customers, build our networks, and manage our networks," he said.
“AI is going to digitise cognition. That is fundamentally very, very different. When you start to digitise decision-making and intelligence, that becomes an engine behind every other engine. To my mind, that dramatic shift is coming,” he added.
Mittal added that India should capitalise what it has built over the next four to seven years which will lead to heightened economic activity and transformational growth. “This is a Bhagya for us where we can fully capitalize what we have already done in the last decades.”
"A couple of implications stand out for me. First, given the number of people who will use AI in India, it may be greater than anywhere else in the world in the coming years. The leadership India can play, not just in what these models mean, but in how we think about data, privacy, security, and trust, is significant," Narayen said.
Terming access to technology as a fundamental need, Mittal said that the necessary framework was in place, giving an example of DPI which had connected everybody to the financial ecosystem, health system, education system. However, the country has to address deploying those solutions for the youth so that India maximises its potential for growth in the coming decades and reduces the flight of its talent pool.
“One of my biggest observations was that India would supply talent to the world as the world ages. I think there's a bit of stress there. We don't necessarily need to move human beings now. You have GCCs, you have research centres coming back here. We could now, on the back of massive broadband infrastructure creation on a global scale, serve everybody from back home,” Mittal added.
He added that India will be able to use, develop, and deploy talent for itself and for the world, despite the geopolitics and immigration barriers. “I think the globe needs to get used to that reality, because where will you find relevant people? Very few pockets.”
Talking on content authenticity and the need to differentiate real and AI generated content, Narayen said there was a urgent requirement of identification of every piece of information, reiterating the words of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who raised the issue of watermarking of AI content.
Mittal pointed to discussions open standards and keeping AI open to the world to democratise it, rather than keeping it in the hands of a few. "Many people have strong views on this. Countries like India and several European leaders assembled here today seem to have a clear message: engage with each other, create open standards, and make AI available to all for the benefit of humanity."
In response to question from Mittal on friction emerging where some leading AI developers and companies keep AI more controlled, Narayen said that inevitably be a tension between commercial enterprises that want to keep information proprietary and the broader goal of doing good for humanity.
"The Prime Minister was correct in reflecting that this will be an ongoing challenge. I can speak for Adobe. One thing we have always done is adopt open standards. The reason PDF became so widely adopted is that it was an open standard. But this will require companies and enterprises to think differently and recognise what their sustainable advantage really is. Over time, I do not believe that advantage will lie only in the model itself. It will lie in the use cases and what people build with that model," he said, adding that India was better positioned than most other countries.
Mittal said that India's Moon mission was a classic example of India’s frugal power of innovation. "Look at the Moon mission. India did it at $74 million, while the U.S. did it at $92 billion. India achieved a perfect landing on the more difficult side of the moon," he said, raising the question on how U.S. companies and large conglomerates can be persuaded to use India not only as a market of millions of users, but also as a place to learn from the frugal innovation.