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As the India AI Impact Summit 2026 unfolded on the second day, the air was thick with a sense of historic inevitability—the conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) were no longer confined to experimentation. The debate had shifted to architecture and how AI should be built for a country of 1.4 billion people.
At the AWS Symposium organised on the sidelines of the summit, Jaime Valles, Vice President, AWS Asia Pacific and Japan, and Uwem Ukpong, Vice President, AWS Global Industries, described what they called the “India Way” — a model of digital transformation that prioritises scale, inclusion and public good over isolated commercial returns.
For a country that built Aadhaar and UPI as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPO) layers serving hundreds of millions, the suggestion was clear: AI represents the next structural tier. Rather than sitting on top of systems, it would be embedded within them—across governance, healthcare, agriculture and financial services.
“The cloud is going to democratise the most important opportunity—opportunity for every single human in India and in the world,” Valles said. “We see AI as the operating system and infrastructure that will enable that foundation for India’s development.”
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Designing AI for India scale
The session also saw scale dominate the discussion. “In many global markets, AI pilots involve a few thousand users. In India, pilots often begin at tens of millions,” Valles noted.
“I learned that what is a pilot in India is a full rollout in other countries in the world,” Valles said. “The pilots here are 30, 40, 50 million… that is the scale you need in order to leverage AI to truly transform the way we do things.”
The collaboration with the IndiaAI Mission was cited as part of this approach, which focuses on developing sovereign AI platforms aligned with India’s regulatory and operational requirements. These systems are intended to support high-volume workloads and continuous public service delivery.
Supporting this direction is AWS’s plan to invest more than Rs 1.1 lakh crore, or about USD 12.7 billion, in cloud infrastructure in India by 2030. The company has also committed access to thousands of GPUs to support sovereign AI initiatives.
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Inclusion Beyond Enterprise Boundaries
The speakers, however, warned that scale without inclusion would fall short in delivering the desired outcome of technology for all.
India’s 22 official languages pose challenges for AI models largely trained in English. Data silos across sectors further complicate deployment.
Ukpong said addressing language and data access barriers is essential to extending AI to India’s informal economy, which includes an estimated 490 million people.
“If you address these barriers… this is how we really start to get AI down to the grassroots and down to the informal economy,” Ukpong said.
Initiatives such as Kisan Sarthi were cited as examples of opening datasets to enable developers to build context-specific tools for farmers and small enterprises that integrate weather insights, pricing signals, and advisory information.
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From Experimentation to Embedded Systems
What emerged from the session was less about product launches and more about positioning. The experts stressed that AI, as discussed, is not being treated as a peripheral technology wave but as infrastructure—woven into Digital Public Infrastructure rather than layered on top.
As India works towards its Viksit Bharat 2047 objective, AI is being positioned within that long-term national framework, embedded in systems designed for population-scale deployment.
The mood around the symposium suggested that the question is no longer whether AI will be adopted in India, but how deeply it will be integrated into public systems.