Ethics, Scale & Speed: What India’s AI Leaders Are Signalling Ahead of AI Summit
Ahead of the upcoming AI Summit in Delhi, industry leaders have struck a confident but cautionary note on India’s artificial intelligence push, stressing the need to pair rapid deployment with strong ethical guardrails.
Key Themes: Scale, Responsibility, and Trust
The themes of scale, responsibility, and trust were central to a pre-summit panel discussion featuring senior executives from NVIDIA, Microsoft, NASSCOM, and HCLTech. They argued that ethical AI is no longer an abstract debate but a business and leadership imperative.
This summit is set to be the fourth and largest AI summit globally, emphasizing the growing significance of AI in various sectors.
Transparency as a Non-Negotiable Principle
Mandar Kulkarni, national technology and security officer for India and South Asia at Microsoft, stated that transparency must be treated as a non-negotiable principle. “You have to build security and compliance at all levels,” he emphasized, adding that transparency underpins ethics, security, and trust. “You can’t be transparent if you are unethical. You can’t be transparent if you are not secure.”
The Importance of Explainability
Surprisingly, the concept of explainability in AI was highlighted as critical for real-world adoption. Sundar R. Nagalingam, senior director at NVIDIA’s AI Consulting Partners, pointed out that, “We cannot implement something because the machine told us to do that.” He stressed the necessity for any behavior to be explained, particularly in sensitive scenarios such as loan rejections by AI.
Human Accountability and Governance
R. Chockalingam, head of AI at NASSCOM, framed the issue as one of human accountability and traceability, asserting that clear ownership for every deployed system, auditable decision pathways, and governance mechanisms that allow for override or decommissioning are essential. This becomes particularly crucial as AI systems increasingly assess, optimize, and make decisions with real-world consequences.
Echoing this sentiment, Govind Chandranani, practice head of Engineering and R&D Services at HCLTech, stated that accountability acts as the anchor for all other safeguards. “If you make somebody accountable, they will do everything else – safety, privacy, explainability,” he noted.
Investment and Talent Development
In the run-up to the Summit, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that leading Indian IT companies have developed over 200 sector-specific AI models, with many set to launch during the event. He revealed that nearly $70 billion has already been invested in the AI infrastructure layer, with the potential for this figure to double by the end of the Summit.
Vaishnaw also outlined a major push on talent development, stating that AI infrastructure access and industry-aligned curricula will be extended to 500 universities to foster a steady pipeline of skilled professionals.
Conclusion: Ethical Discipline as a Prerequisite
As India accelerates its AI adoption across various sectors, panelists agreed that embedding ethical discipline into innovation is not a brake on speed but a prerequisite for sustainable scale.
