I’ll be honest with you — when I first started tracking the India AI Impact Summit 2026 a few months ago, I thought it would be another well-intentioned gathering of global leaders making non-binding pledges, posing for cameras, and flying home. I’ve attended enough conferences to be cynical.
But what is unfolding this week at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi — the first global AI summit ever hosted in the Global South — is genuinely different. And as someone who has spent years tracking market trends at the intersection of technology and finance, I believe what is happening in these rooms directly connects to one of the most significant wealth creation opportunities of the next decade.
Let me walk you through what’s happening, what it means, and why the timing of our newly published asset tokenization report from NAVADHI could not be more relevant.
The Summit That Changed the AI Conversation
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is the fourth instalment of a global AI summit series that began at Bletchley Park, England, in November 2023. Each edition has reflected the geopolitical and technological mood of its moment:
- Bletchley Park 2023 — 28 nations, cautious, focused entirely on frontier AI safety risks
- Seoul 2024 — broader participation, started integrating deployment and governance
- Paris 2025 — transatlantic tensions on AI regulation, dominated by JD Vance’s warning against ‘excessive regulation’
- New Delhi 2026 — 100+ nations, 250,000 expected attendees, a decisive pivot to measurable impact
India’s choice of theme — ‘Impact’ over ‘Safety’ — is a deliberate statement. Prime Minister Modi announced this Summit at the Paris gathering specifically to reframe the conversation around what AI can do, not just what it might risk.
Inaugurating the Summit today, PM Modi described AI as comparable in civilisational importance to the discovery of fire and the invention of wireless communication. That framing matters — it sets the political will behind a technology that will touch every industry, every market, and ultimately every investment thesis.
