New Delhi: India’s sequenced, inclusive AI approach shapes global policy: CMR report
Drawing a progression link from the Paris AI Action Summit 2025, CyberMedia Research (CMR) believes that the India AI Impact Summit 2026, now underway, must evolve with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI)-led development, focused inclusion, and democratising AI for social welfare. The research firm’s latest brief on the summit, titled ‘Translating Intent into Impact’, notes that India’s AI conversation is now centred around building durable capabilities in enterprises and public policy, as well as deploying AI to deliver public services.
This is in sharp contrast to global AI themes, which tend to revolve around extensive investments, frontier model breakthroughs, and geopolitical tensions. The report notes what it calls India’s “system-first playbook” approach to building digital public infrastructure for scale and robustness—something that has delivered success time and again, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) being a recent example.
“India’s approach to AI funding reflects a broader policy philosophy. Rather than treating AI as a standalone line item, public investment has focused on building enabling capacity—talent, compute, platforms, and research ecosystems—consistent with India’s Digital Public Infrastructure model,” the report says. With a defining shift that no longer treats AI as a moonshot technology but as something reliable enough for public infrastructure, CMR insists that enterprises and small businesses, too, are providing momentum to this shift.
CMR believes that what differentiates India’s AI moment isn’t speed or scale alone—it’s sequencing, particularly in the context of digital public infrastructure. To that point, the report contrasts this with the insight that approximately 80% of India’s Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) remain at basic or intermediate digital maturity. Only 4–5% use AI for advanced automation.
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“India’s inclusion challenge is not awareness of AI, but absorption. The data shows that AI adoption scales only when embedded into existing systems MSMEs already rely on. This has direct implications for how platforms, policies, and incentives are designed,” the report notes.
As AI adoption accelerates, a paradox emerges: 63% of CISOs cite AI-driven attacks as their top threat, and 75% are investing in AI-based threat detection. Yet only 38% feel fully prepared for AI-related regulatory change. This chasm between cybersecurity investments and planning, as well as regulatory preparedness—particularly for AI-focused changes—is why India has so far taken a considerate, well-thought-through approach to AI regulation, in sharp contrast to the US and EU methodology.
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A question that is often asked is: how does this impact the workforce? The report assesses that AI will change job structures in the next two to three years but notes a critical vulnerability—only 42% of engineers cite a lack of structured programmes as the key barrier to learning AI. “Without structured, applied learning and research pathways, AI adoption will continue to outpace depth, ownership, and accountability,” the report says.
The advantage in India’s approach, which tech leaders worldwide have noted, lies in using AI in ways that complement the human workforce, not replace it—a cognitive co-pilot, in other words, without heavy investments to compete with other countries in building frontier models. Last year, the Paris AI Action Summit 2025 focused on regulation, sovereign investments, and geopolitical competition, the latter of which has continued to fuel battles between US and Chinese AI companies.
Vishal Mathur is Technology Editor for Hindustan Times. When not making sense of technology, he often searches for an elusive analog space in a digital world.
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