What the World Can Learn from India's Inclusive AI Journey

Original Publication Date: 2025-09-17 Original Byline: Vilas Dhar | President, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation

When the world gathers in India for the Global AI Impact Summit in February 2026, it would be easy to mistake it for one more technology conference. But this could be a very different get-together. It could become a defining test of whether governments, companies and academics can choose a path of co-creation, drawing lessons from India’s experiment with open digital innovation to build a global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem that serves humanity.

India’s digital public infrastructure shows what happens when openness is a design feature of a system from the beginning. Aadhaar, the open digital identity framework, now serves more than 1.4 billion people. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), built as an interoperable financial network, has become one of the world’s most used payment systems, processing nearly 17 billion transactions in January 2025 alone. Together, these systems helped increase the share of financially-included individuals in India from 53% in 2014 to 80% by 2024, a transformation that would have otherwise taken decades.

Choose openness over proprietary control

There is a lesson here for the world - growth doesn't happen merely by replication, but by setting long-term intention and disciplined, consistent execution. By choosing openness over proprietary control, India demonstrates that transformative technologies can scale while remaining accessible to those who need them most. That same choice, applied to open source AI, could create a flowering of innovative outcomes.

Much of today’s AI development, especially in the West, is shaped by corporate competition and closed architectures. Companies often seek short-term advantage by restricting access to models and infrastructure. Yet, the most disruptive advances in AI are already emerging from open-source communities that prioritize accessibility over control.

India’s unique position makes it an outlier story in what is often characterized as an AI ecosystem dominated by the West and China. India’s linguistic diversity, demographic breadth and democratic values create a natural testbed for AI systems that must serve varied communities. Projects like Bhashini, India’s AI translation platform, show how open collaboration across languages and cultures can expand access to information at scale – and bring billions of new users into new markets created by AI tools.

Openness as a strategic and moral imperative

But this is not only India’s story. It is a global opportunity. If AI is to become the infrastructure of the twenty-first century, the world must treat openness as a strategic and moral imperative. That means making datasets – especially those that cover non-commercial realities that matter deeply to individual and community welfare – compute resources and safety tools broadly available. It means enabling startups and nonprofits to innovate without prohibitive technical or financial barriers. It means creating shared mechanisms, such as India’s proposed AI Safety Institute, and moving into cross-border activities by building collaborative efforts, like Robust Online Open Safety Tools (ROOST), which develops and distributes safety tools for everyone.

The economic case is clear. A recent survey by McKinsey, Mozilla Foundation and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (which I lead) found that organizations prioritizing AI are 40% more likely to adopt open-source models versus their closed competitor models. Nearly three-quarters of technology firms already use at least one open-source model. Openness lowers costs, increases future flexibility, reduces duplication of effort and accelerates innovation globally.

As the host of the 2026 Global AI Summit, India has the opportunity to extend this lesson outward. The UN Global Digital Compact has already called for open data, open standards and open AI models by 2030. India can align this global agenda with its own experience, convening governments, corporations and civil society to move from principle to practice.

Lessons for the world

When systems are built open from the beginning, they establish trust, invite participation and accelerate adoption. UPI and Aadhaar scaled rapidly because entrepreneurs, banks, and communities could integrate without prohibitive licensing or closed architectures. Retrofitting openness after the fact often leads to technical inefficiencies and governance battles that slow progress. Starting open ensures that infrastructure evolves with broad input and becomes more resilient over time.

India’s linguistic and demographic range has proven that diverse participation creates stronger systems. When technologies are tested in many different contexts, they adapt more quickly and avoid the narrow biases that emerge in homogeneous environments. Bhashini’s success reflects this principle: by engaging multiple communities in building its linguistic databases, the platform produced tools that are accurate, widely accepted and globally relevant. Diversity, when embraced as a design feature, produces systems that are inclusive and adaptable far beyond their original setting.

When datasets, compute resources and safety tools are made widely accessible, innovation does not remain the privilege of a few dominant actors. Small startups gain the capacity to compete, academics can test new ideas and governments can deploy public-interest applications without vendor lock-in. Shared resources create a baseline of capability on which specialized solutions can be built. The multiplier effect is clear: one investment in shared infrastructure can support thousands of applications that serve local communities and global challenges.

A closing call for global co-creation

India’s Global AI Summit in 2026 must be more than a spotlight on achievement. It should launch a new phase of global collaboration. The Summit should signal that every nation, institution and scholar is invited not just to observe, but to build together. Official activities from the IndiaAI Mission demonstrate how inclusive strategy and multidisciplinary collaboration can ground national AI ambitions in openness and shared values. India offers not a closed blueprint, but a working model and a partner for global AI co-creation.

By aligning India’s open innovation experience with global purpose, we can build systems to confront humanity’s most urgent challenges together. The Global AI Summit of 2026 could mark the moment the world pledged co-creation – not just for India’s AI future, but for all of humanity.