For its entire duration, the CNBC-TV18 Edge AI Studio, presented by Qualcomm, stood at the physical and intellectual heart of the India AI Impact Summit 2026. Located within Bharat Mandapam, it became a forum where the Summit's grand theme of 'People, Planet, and Progress' was distilled into engaging conversations about architecture, trust, sovereignty, and scale. The studio hosted a remarkable procession of global leaders, policymakers, founders, and technologists, who represented a wide array of industrial ambitions and strategic visions. Their voices, when woven together, described the contours of a pivotal moment in history, as India sought to assert its leadership in the AI age.
Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw set the tone for the gathering, when he said, "India will play on the front foot." The sovereign models launched at the summit, the partnerships announced, and the infrastructure commitments sealed all pointed to a nation that has moved beyond asking whether it can compete. The question now is how far and how fast it can lead.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, reflected on India as one of the fastest-growing AI markets, speaking of scale and adoption. "India is just building incredible AI", he said in an exclusive interview at the CNBC-TV18 Edge AI Studio. "There's no country in the world that quite matches India for total AI anymore." He also spoke about OpenAI's partnership with TCS and its role in India's AI infrastructure build-out, highlighting the transformation underway in India's IT services sector.
Krithivasan, CEO of TCS, represented this shift, with companies like his pivoting to become partners in their clients' AI journeys rather than mere service providers. The insight underscored how India's traditional technology strengths were evolving to meet the demands of the AI age.
This sovereignty theme resonated across conversations. The architectural question of where intelligence resides is at the core of the promise of hybrid AI, which has been championed by Qualcomm as means to distribute technological capability -training in the cloud, inference at the edge - and fulfill AI's national purpose without ceding too much control to centralized cloud systems.
The prize, however, is immense. Robyn Scott, Co-Founder and CEO of Apolitical, cited BCG estimates of a $1.75 trillion productivity opportunity if AI is deployed in the right manner. Roy Jakobs, CEO of Philips, described AI as a 'necessity' for healthcare, to close the gap between patient demand and supply of caregivers. Sunil Wadhwani, Co-Founder of Wadhwani AI, articulated a vision of 'AI for social development', noting how technological progress can improve the lives of people.
Nikesh Arora also addressed the massive capital expenditure required to bolster AI infrastructure. "We need a lot more capacity than we have." Drawing an analogy to telecom bandwidth, he argued that applications will consume whatever computing power is available.
Beyond the physical infrastructure, Vishal Sikka, Founder and CEO of Vianai Systems and former Infosys CEO, spoke of an emerging global skill gap, which belied his optimism about India's potential. "The number of people who could build you a foundation model is in the single-digit thousand", he said. "That number has to change."
Andrew Freedman, Co-Founder of Fathom, a non-profit focused on AI governance, called for a marketplace of third-party verification solutions. "If we don't figure out a way for people to have earned trust in the system, adoption will drop," he warned. "Trust and innovation are married."
As the summit drew to a close, viewers got to glimpse the Indian leadership of the AI age that Ashwini Vaishnaw alluded to earlier. The conversations within the studio mapped the terrain upon which that leadership would be built, and it was marked by immense possibility, profound responsibility, and historic opportunity.
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First Published: Mar 16, 2026, 19:30
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