The India AI Impact Summit 2026 day 2 buzzed with energy as the show floor opened for a larger audience on Tuesday (February 17) even as the focus shifted from policy debates to real-world action. With over 300 exhibitors from 30 countries, the expo showcased practical AI use cases and the technology’s prowess in solving real-world problems. The major centre of attraction was humanoid robots that can assist in factories and AI models that allows users to converse in their own languages.
The Summit also showcased India’s growing capabilities in AI infrastructure, sovereign models, supercomputing, education technology, healthcare innovation and fintech security.
IT minister Ahswini Vaishnaw said that India will scale its compute capacity beyond the existing 38,000 GPUs with the addition of 20,000 GPUs in the coming weeks.
He highlighted that this marks the next phase of India’s AI strategy, with a significant expansion of compute infrastructure and a focus on responsible AI deployment.
Humanoids and ‘Physical AI’
The biggest crowds today gathered around the robotics and intelligent manufacturing pavilions as they demonstrated deployment-ready humanoid systems. Unlike the robots of the past that were confined to labs, these new models are designed for high-demand sectors like retail, logistics and smart agriculture.
AI for Everyone: Breaking the language barrier
Another major theme of Day 2 was the democratisation of AI. For AI to work in a country as diverse as India, it must speak more than just English even as exhibitors showcased multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) designed specifically for Indian regional nuances. These tools are aimed at helping small business owners in remote villages to use AI for accounting, content generation and more.
Vaishnaw also stated that several models launched at the Summit have been tested and measured against multiple parameters. When compared with global models, several Indian models have been rated better than many large international AI systems, underscoring India’s innovation capabilities.
IT minister slams potential misuse of AI
Acknowledging the potential misuse of AI, the IT minister highlighted the importance of a techno-legal approach to ensure AI is used for good while minimising harmful impacts. He also backed stronger regulations to tackle problems like deepfakes.
IT minister said that AI is also impacting the publishers and they must get fair remuneration when their content is used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train their models.
“Copyrights is also part of it. This is very complex. As most of the AI models are trained on media which is available in public domain. We believe that content creators, specially news creators, they must get a fair remuneration for the content they are creating,” said Vaishnaw while responding to reporters’ questions at the India AI Summit 2026.
“That is something that we sincerely believe as a government, and I think the public policy should also be oriented towards that. We are talking to the big platforms they have, more-or-less, shown inclination towards the process by which fair remuneration to content creators, especially the news creators who are the part of the conventional media where the content is used by digital platforms,” the minister added.
