VIEWPOINT | India can help bridge AI division

Guest column by Prakash Gupta, Consul General of India-Seattle

Consul General of the India Consulate in Seattle Prakash Gupta listens to Gov. Larry Rhoden during a visit to Pierre while Debadutta Dash, an advisor of Gupta’s, sits to his right. (Courtesy of SD Governor’s Office)

At last year’s Artificial Intelligence summit in Paris co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, a particular remark by the Prime Minister of India sparked an interesting social media trend.

“If you upload your medical report to an AI app, it can explain in simple terms free of any jargon what it means for your health. But if you ask the same AI app to draw an image of someone writing with their left hand, the app will most likely draw someone writing with their right hand.”

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People on social media immediately started trying those prompts and shared their AI generated images corroborating the bias in AI, the Prime Minister of India was pointing out. With this remark, while announcing that the next AI Summit in 2026 will be hosted in India, Prime Minister of India has also implicitly declared the agenda of the next summit — India’s AI summit will have “inclusive growth” as one of its main focus.

As such, the upcoming India AI Impact Summit 2026 is happening this week over five days in New Delhi with participation from more than a hundred countries and twenty world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Brazil President Lula da Silva, Switzerland President Guy Parmelin, Sri Lanka President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Spain President Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, Prime Ministers of Greece, Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Kazakhstan among others. The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres along with several senior UN leaders will also join the summit. American delegations who work alongside South Dakota Trade and U.S. Undersecretary to Agriculture Luke Lindberg will also attend.

As the first AI Summit hosted being hosted in the Global South, the Summit is guided by three foundational pillars: People, Planet & Progress. Those are being positioned as shared global priorities for all the participating countries. The word “Impact” in the Summit title carries significance as the focus is not just on tech talk, but also on generating real outcomes on every section of global societies.

India’s approach to AI has been extremely well received, especially by the countries in the developing world. While the previous summits primarily focused on creating acceptable frameworks, and were abstract in nature, India’s approach is rooted in its desire to create measurable, people-centric impact. This approach stems from India’s experience in building its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) platforms.

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For example, the principles behind India’s success in utilizing the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to touch the lives of almost everybody dealing with any monetary transactions can be emulated in the AI landscape. As of today, UPI accounts to around 700 million transactions per day, a prime demonstration of how democratization of technology can impact the last man in the society. In a similar fashion, India wants to make AI transparent, accessible and beneficial for all.

India has earmarked $116 million in 2024 for India AI Mission over the next five years. These funds will offer access to over 38,000 GPUs on a subsidized cloud model to startups and academic researchers. Subsidized rates are around $1 per hour per GPU, much lower than global cloud GPU rates. With investments from Amazon, Microsoft and Google, India’s data center capacity is expected to grow in tandem with AI usage domestically. In an effort, to develop end to end in-house capabilities, India has also set a goal of achieving 100 GW of Nuclear Power by the year 2047.

India’s AI approach also resonates well with that of the United States. India’s AI Summit seeks consensus from all the participating countries on shared principles and inclusive governance. It aims to bring the voices of the global south to the center of AI discourse. Today, AI leaders in the United States prioritize balancing innovation and profits with ethics and human rights.

Seattle and the Pacific Northwest region form a vital link for this collaboration between India and the US. It is home to major AI Innovation Hubs like Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Allen Institute for AI and numerous startups building AI solutions to pressing problems. The Seattle delegation to the Summit has major partners of India in its global quest to build “AI for ALL”, including Mr. Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft and Chair of Gates Foundation, Mr. Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, Mr. David Zapolsky, Senior Vice-President at Amazon, among several other senior delegates from US Pacific North West.

Prime Minister Modi’s example of right-handed bias in today’s AI systems reminds us that the challenge before us is not only to make AI smarter, faster, or more profitable, but to make it fairer and more inclusive. From New Delhi to Seattle, from policymakers to technologists, we share a collective responsibility to ensure that the next-gen AI reflects humanity’s diversity, and recognizes every student — even the left-handed.

Prakash Gupta is the Consul General of India in the ally nation’s Seattle office, responsible for guiding U.S.-India relations in South Dakota as well as Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.