Nations rarely get clean debuts in the technologies that will define their century. They get moments — messy, revealing, instructive.
India’s ongoing AI Impact Summit was meant to be a coronation: a quarter of a million registrants, more than twenty heads of state, hundreds of global AI leaders and exhibitors. The message was unmistakable. India intends not merely to adopt artificial intelligence, but to shape it — for itself and for the Global South.
And yet the first images that traveled fastest were not of breakthroughs or bold ideas. They were of queues.
At Bharat Mandapam, its venue, attendees stood for hours without clear direction. Internet connections sputtered at a gathering meant to celebrate the digital future. Delegates wandered between halls, missing sessions they had flown across continents to attend. At food counters in the country that claims to have built the world’s most frictionless real-time payments network, cash was king.
Stories — some verified, others impossible to confirm — circulated about exhibitors surrendering devices to security and struggling to retrieve them. Whether rumor or fact, such anecdotes moved faster than any keynote.
The summit became, briefly, a parable about the distance between ambition and execution.
That distance matters. In a field where credibility is currency, first impressions compound. Artificial intelligence is not judged only by white papers and policy frameworks; it is judged by whether a country can translate complexity into coherence. When the experience frays, so does the narrative.
The irony is that India has learnt how to execute at scale. It built Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity system, enrolling over a billion people with remarkable speed. It created UPI, a payments architecture so seamless that street vendors and multinational corporations transact on the same rails. It sent Chandrayaan to the moon on a fraction of the budgets once thought necessary. These were not spectacles alone. They were systems — disciplined, iterative, citizen-facing systems.
Why, then, did a summit devoted to AI falter on the fundamentals?
Part of the answer lies in the nature of spectacle. Large gatherings that promise historic scale can begin to prioritize optics over flow, choreography over clarity. The banners are printed. The dignitaries are scheduled. Security hardens. But the invisible architecture — the routing logic, the redundancy in connectivity, the choreography of crowds — determines whether ambition feels real or theatrical.
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The first two days of the summit suggested that India’s AI moment will be decided less by what is announced from the stage and more by how the corridors are managed.
For the students who traveled overnight from tier three towns, the founders who bootstrapped their way into exhibition slots, the mid-career engineers who took leave to attend, the memory was not of speeches but of waiting.
In AI, time is not an abstraction. It is the core resource. Models optimize it. Start-ups burn it. Investors price it. Wasting hours in queues is not a minor inconvenience; it is an opportunity cost borne by the very people whose creativity the nation hopes to harness. This is not pedantry. It is perception.
The world evaluates ecosystems holistically. China’s rise in hardware was accompanied by tightly run expos that signaled industrial discipline. The United States’ software dominance was reinforced by developer conferences that felt frictionless, almost invisible in their orchestration. Europe’s regulatory leadership is staged through orderly summits that convey institutional steadiness. A nation’s gatherings become proxies for its governance capacity.
India’s aspiration is distinct. It has spoken of human-centered AI, of inclusion, of ensuring that the Global South does not become a testing ground but a co-author of the future. Those are worthy ambitions. They recognize that artificial intelligence will reshape labor markets, education systems, and political discourse. They acknowledge that scale without equity can entrench inequality. But inclusion begins with experience.
India understands hospitality at a level few cultures can rival. Weddings anticipate the smallest detail; guests are guided, fed, oriented, welcomed. There is choreography in the chaos, warmth in the magnitude. The summit, by contrast, at times felt as though the spectacle was centered while the participants orbited it. Innovators felt less like honored guests and more like managed crowds.
That perception carries risk. The real ambassadors of India’s AI future are not the CEOs who deliver polished remarks. They are the students coding at midnight, the founders recruiting in cramped coworking spaces, the teachers introducing machine learning in small-town classrooms. If they feel peripheral, the ecosystem narrows.
None of this negates the summit’s substance. By all accounts, the agenda was serious: sessions on employability in an automated age, on governance frameworks, on preventing AI from amplifying inequality. Registration numbers alone signal something profound — that curiosity about AI in India is no longer elite but mainstream. The hunger is real.
Enthusiasm is India’s structural advantage. It is abundant, youthful, impatient. The question is whether institutions can match that energy with discipline.
Artificial intelligence, at its core, is about optimization under constraint. It is about designing systems that scale without collapsing. If India is to lead in AI, its public institutions must embody the very principles the technology demands: clarity of process, redundancy against failure, user-centered design. A summit is not a side show. It is a stress test.
Perception shapes investment. Investors decide where to place capital based not only on policy incentives but on signals of administrative competence. Talented engineers choose ecosystems that respect their time. International partners assess reliability through lived experience, not press releases.
India has already demonstrated that it can deliver when it treats execution as strategy. Aadhaar worked because it was engineered as infrastructure, not spectacle. UPI scaled because it prioritized interoperability and simplicity over grandeur. The space program succeeded because it married ambition with frugality and rigor. These were not triumphs of rhetoric. They were triumphs of systems thinking.
READ: Satish Jha | India’s AI carnival: A warning and a bet on the future (February 17, 2026)
The AI summit’s early missteps, then, should not be remembered as embarrassment. They should be remembered as diagnosis.
A diagnosis that says ambition has outrun process. That scale was invited before flow was perfected. That security was hardened without equivalent investment in navigation and communication. These are fixable gaps — if acknowledged.
India’s leaders want to play long games. They know that global leadership is not conferred; it is accumulated. In artificial intelligence, accumulation will come through consistent, boring competence as much as through visionary announcements. It will come from building institutions that treat citizens — especially young innovators — as partners rather than audiences.
The first images of the summit may have been of lines. But lines are instructive. They show where capacity bottlenecks. They reveal where systems strain. They make visible what is otherwise hidden.
If India studies those lines with the same seriousness it applies to code, the summit will mark not a stumble but a turning point.
Because leadership in AI will not be secured by claiming a seat at the table. It will be secured by demonstrating, repeatedly, that the table is well built, the chairs are steady, and every participant knows exactly where to sit.
In the end, artificial intelligence is about amplifying human potential. The measure of India’s success will not be the number of heads of state in attendance, nor the scale of the expo floor. It will be whether the next student who boards a train to attend such a summit returns home feeling that her time was honored, her ideas valued, and her country capable.
The lines at Bharat Mandapam were long. The lesson they offer is longer still. India’s AI moment has not been lost. It has been clarified. And clarity, in the age of intelligence, is power.