India AI Impact Summit: Global CEOs call for inclusive use of AI

Strike note of optimism and urgency, calling AI as an opportunity for economic acceleration

Global technology leaders on Thursday, the fourth day of the AI Impact Summit, struck a balance between optimism and urgency, framing artificial intelligence (AI) as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for economic acceleration — particularly for emerging economies — but one that would require choices on infrastructure, investment, and governance. 

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer (CEO), Google, described the current moment as the cusp of hyperprogress, with AI capable of helping countries leapfrog legacy gaps, but cautioned that such outcomes were neither automatic nor guaranteed without responsible and collaborative development. He also called for bridging the digital divide on AI. 

“Technology brings incredible benefits, but we must ensure everyone has access to them,” he said in his keynote address.

 

Sam Altman, CEO and cofounder of OpenAI, said India’s unique position as the world’s largest democracy was important to not just build AI but also to shape its trajectory. 

He also said that an early form of superintelligence could appear in a few years. 

Echoing the need for structural readiness, Microsoft President Brad Smith called for a three-pronged approach centred on scaling up infrastructure, mobilising public and private capital, and building inclusive, multilingual AI systems for the Global South. 

Adding a more ambitious economic lens, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pointed to India’s technical depth and growth potential as a rare combination that could unlock outsized gains in an AI-led economy. 

“India is one of the places in the world I wonder if there could be 20-25 per cent growth … unknown in the world. But I think it kind of stacks all the factors for a very bullish picture,” said Amodei. 

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, meanwhile, emphasised that AI must be harnessed as an engine for broadbased growth, requiring reinvention across enterprises and workforce models, with humans firmly in the lead of this transformation. 

Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer at Meta, outlined the core requirements for building AI and highlighted India’s growing role in the global AI ecosystem. 

Safety remains central to Meta’s AI development, Wang stressed. 

“Our AI needs to work the way we say it does, as well as we say it does and as safely and securely as we need it to.” 

On India’s scale, Wang said: “Three and a half billion people use at least one of our apps every day. More than half a billion are in India alone.” 

Meanwhile, Yann LeCun, who teaches computer science at New York University and is considered the “father of AI”, said the discussion on AGI (artificial general intelligence) was hype. 

“I think the most interesting thing that we’re going to build is an amplifier for human intelligence. So maybe not an entity that surpasses human intelligence, and in all the men, all that will happen at some point. But it is something that will amplify human intelligence, it weighs, well, et cetera, in progress.” 

He suggested that countries with a bright youth population, like India and African nations, were those where the most creative AI breakthroughs would originate.