India is emerging as a pivotal force in shaping responsible and inclusive artificial intelligence (AI) development for the Global South, experts from academia and industry said at the Carnegie Global Technology Summit Innovation Dialogue 2025 on Thursday.
Speakers said India’s scale, multilingual environment and policy outreach position it uniquely to bridge global AI innovation with local needs, particularly in areas such as compute access, cultural alignment and safe deployment.
CK Cheruvettolil, Consultant at DGA–Albright Stonebridge Group, said compute capacity remains unevenly distributed across the world, limiting the Global South’s ability to adopt advanced AI. “There is computing available around the world, but it’s not evenly distributed. For the Global South to take advantage of compute, it really needs access to that compute,” he said. India, he added, is well placed to serve as a “middle way” between the US, which leads frontier-model development, and China, which is rapidly expanding open-source AI.
Rodolfo Corona, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley, said global benchmarks often fail when applied to different cultural settings. “If I move the benchmark from a country in the global north to one in the south, the evaluation is no longer going to be as reliable,” he said, adding that involving local actors is essential for building culturally grounded systems. Corona also said India has played an important convening role in bringing policymakers, industry and researchers together across the Global South.
On regulation, he said AI requires safeguards similar to social media to protect users from risks such as bias, data exposure and harmful recommendations.
David Joseph Menezes, Director, Programs at People+AI, said advances in multilingual AI have raised the stakes for safe and reliable outputs. “If a farmer asks a query and they get wrong advice and act on it, it could result in crop failure for the year,” he said, adding that LLM responses increasingly influence real-world decisions.
Carnegie India organised the dialogue as an official pre-summit event to the AI Impact Summit 2026, which will take place in New Delhi next year from February 15 to 20.
(ANI)
