Market for apps, funding pitches to precede policy declaration at AI summit

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: India’s AI Impact Summit, which opened on Monday with a series of high-level industry dialogues, is expected to boost funding and global collaboration opportunities for the country’s private enterprises, shifting focus away from a potential policy consensus among participating nations.

Three previous AI summits have been held so far—the first in the UK in 2023, followed by South Korea in 2024 and France in 2025. While each produced policy declarations, none were binding or led to an actionable outcome in international collaboration or to an impact on private companies.

Industry stakeholders said in the absence of a binding international coalition and prevailing geopolitics, India’s biggest victory at the ongoing summit will be to showcase startups and private enterprises working on AI to global investors, and to attract global business for data centres and AI applications. As a result, discussions around a policy consensus could take a back seat.

“Given the current geopolitics, the way to go for most countries is a sovereign approach to artificial intelligence—and not globally distributed," said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at consultancy firm, Gartner. “As a result, a policy consensus, while likely, is not going to be binding on companies—and will thus not be the most effective.

We’ve seen the same happen at the three previous editions as well." A single global policy is usually difficult to achieve because different countries have different problems, different resources, and different aspirations, said Ankush Sabharwal, founder of CoRover AI and Bharat GPT. “Rather than producing binding global laws, these summits should be seen as platforms where countries can