India AI Impact Summit was extended by one day, so we thought of using Saturday well and visit Bharat Mandapam. In the last week of February 2026, Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi pulsed with excitement, ideas, and high-stakes collaborations. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 was more than a tech conference — it was a living showcase of what AI looks like when innovation meets scale, ambition meets practicality, and global players meet homegrown brilliance.
Every corner of the venue brimmed with activity: dazzling corporate pavilions, intricate demos from startups and research labs, and bustling spaces where universities exhibited real solutions built for life in India.
The Venue Itself — A Stage for the Future
Walking into Bharat Mandapam was like stepping into an AI city of India.
The vast halls were organized into thematic zones — enterprise transformation, startup innovation, university research showcases, interactive demos, and multinational pavilions.
Advanced staging, massive LED displays, and immersive demo pods helped explain complex technology intuitively — making AI accessible even to non-technical visitors.
Every pavilion wasn’t just signage and brochures: live demos, hands-on interactions, expert Q&A stations, and deep tech showcases became the norm.
This was not a static trade show; it was an experiential AI expo designed to grind down the barrier between innovation and engagement.
Global Giants and Strategic Partnerships
Large multinational companies didn’t just come to observe — they showcased commitments and collaborations that hint at how India will shape AI’s future.
OpenAI
The ChatGPT maker used the summit as a platform to expand academic engagement. It unveiled partnerships with:
IIT Delhi
IIM Ahmedabad
- AIIMS…aimed at building campus-wide AI capabilities, including secure AI tools for research, teaching, and student learning experiences. This signalled an educational pivot — where AI becomes a mainstream academic tool rather than an optional add-on.
OpenAI also linked with Indian edtech platforms to broaden AI literacy beyond engineering labs and into mass upskilling.
Microsoft
One of the most eye-catching commitments came from Microsoft’s leadership: the company reaffirmed multi-billion-dollar AI investments, including plans to deepen infrastructure, research, and industry applications across India and the broader Global South.
The message was clear: India is a priority market not just for deployment, but for co-creation of AI tools and platforms.
Adobe — Creativity Meets AI for Every Student
One of the most engaging booths for young visitors was Adobe’s pavilion, which stayed crowded throughout the event.
Instead of focusing on enterprise customers, Adobe did something unusual — it targeted students, designers, and creators.
The booth demonstrated:
generative image editing
automated video enhancement
AI-assisted photo retouching
text-to-design workflows
instant background replacement and scene creation
Visitors could literally sit at workstations and create posters, illustrations, and social media creatives within minutes — many first-time users experiencing creative software without intimidation.
But the real headline was the announcement:
Adobe introduced a program to provide free access to select creative and AI tools for students in India.
This was significant.
AI conversations often revolve around engineers and developers. Adobe shifted the narrative — AI is also for:
photographers
designers
filmmakers
content creators
storytellers
In a country where millions of students learn visually and creatively, this may become one of the most impactful announcements of the summit. It essentially lowers the barrier for creative expression and digital skills at a national scale.
Google’s pavilion focused on AI that is responsible, scalable, and inclusive — showcasing multilingual AI research, AI-enhanced cloud products tailored to India’s enterprise and developer communities, and tools oriented toward real-world search and data insights.
NVIDIA and Cloud Infrastructure
From high-performance AI compute to edge-optimized solutions, NVIDIA and cloud partners highlighted how compute power will scale up nationwide — a key prerequisite for deploying large AI models at enterprise and public service levels.
Startups Stealing the Spotlight
One of the most thrilling aspects of the Summit was seeing India’s deep-tech startups step onto an international stage — not to wow with hype, but to demonstrate actual, bite-sized, real outcome-oriented AI solutions.
Here’s a snapshot of some of the most talked-about innovations:
Sarvam AI
Sarvam AI made one of the most memorable statements: advanced language models and hardware making AI locally relevant.
Their next-generation language models (including very large parameter MoE models) were on display — versatile across Indian languages and multimodal tasks.
Most striking: Sarvam’s AI-powered smart glasses, a wearable that interprets surroundings and provides contextual insights — meshing computer vision with language and real-time audio feedback.
These products weren’t just prototypes — they were showcased as complete working systems, generating excitement among global tech leaders and investors alike.
Indian Startup Solutions on Real Problems
Other homegrown startups turned heads with pragmatic AI implementations:
SATHEE — an AI-driven education platform offering personalised study plans, confusion detection, and automated content summaries in many Indian languages.
Iiris — smart security augmentation that makes existing camera systems intelligent, turning CCTV into proactive detection systems rather than passive recorders.
RailLabs — using autonomous robots to pre-emptively detect rail track defects — a literal AI deployment on national infrastructure to prevent accidents.
These setups showed something rare: AI solutions that solve real operational problems and aren’t just experimental.
Universities at the Forefront of Innovation
India’s top academic institutions didn’t just exhibit posters — they presented working technologies, research partnerships, and future collaboration frameworks.
IIT Roorkee
IIT Roorkee used the summit to strengthen global research ties, signing MoUs with international research centers to accelerate collaborative AI and data science work across borders.
IIT Indore
At their pavilion, IIT Indore highlighted AI solutions in healthcare, climate, precision agriculture, smart infrastructure, and cybersecurity — not as abstract concepts, but as deployable platforms ready for pilot programs with industry partners.
Their AgriHub technologies, for example, showed how AI can analyze real field data to provide actionable insights for farmers.
IIT Bombay & Collaborations
IIT Bombay led an exciting consortium — including corporate partners — to work on large-scale foundational AI models with the ambition of pushing towards trillion-parameter models. This partnership represented a national push toward indigenous foundational model research.
Other Academic Voices
Many other Indian institutions — from accessibility AI groups to XR and haptics labs — filled their spaces with thoughtful applications of AI in education, safety, health diagnostics, and digital accessibility. These weren’t just prototypes; they were proof points of India’s deep bench of AI talent.
Beyond Tech — The Arrangements That Made It Work
Part of what made Bharat Mandapam feel historic was the careful orchestration of the event itself:
Thematic Zones and Immersive Displays: The venue was organized to help attendees explore sectors, use cases, and technological layers — from cloud and compute to responsible AI to real service deployments — without feeling lost.
Live Demo Pods: Instead of static booths, many ventures ran live tests, simulations, and interactive presentations that helped non-technical visitors grasp AI’s power.
Forums and Fireside Chats: Dialogue spaces allowed CEOs, researchers, and policymakers to openly discuss challenges — not just sell products — which gave the summit intellectual depth beyond marketing.
Student and Public Engagement: Areas dedicated to student projects and learner pathways highlighted the idea that AI is not just for technologists, but for every future career.
AI for India — Shifting from Buzzwords to Impact
What set the India AI Impact Summit apart was the grounded sense of purpose:
This wasn’t a summit about the next shiny AI model.
It was about AI that matters:
AI that works in multiple Indian languages.
AI that solves real problems in education, security, transport, and healthcare.
AI where Indian companies and universities lead the invention, not merely consume global technology.
If there was a defining theme here, it was this:
Tech excellence must translate into societal impact — and India is building the bridges to make that happen.
The summit might be over, but the ideas, partnerships, and products showcased here are just beginning their journey — and many of them may shape how the world thinks about applied AI in the years to come.
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