NDTV AI Impact Summit: Highlights Of Who Said What

The NDTV India.AI Summit 2026, held at the ITC Maurya in New Delhi, brought together a distinguished group of policymakers, global tech leaders, and innovators to explore the future of artificial intelligence. As the technology moves from experimental phases to large-scale deployment, the summit addressed critical themes including global policy, ethical safeguards, national sovereignty, and the transformative potential of AI for India and the world.

Here are the quotes from global leaders and experts who spoke at the event:

Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley Professor and AI Pioneer on 'Who Decides? The Question  at the Heart of AI'

"I have children, I do not want AI systems convincing my children to commit suicide. And that has happened to some people's children. And it's a tragedy, and we need to make sure that those responsible, pay compensation, and that it doesn't happen again."

Rishi Sunak, Former UK Prime Minister on 'The Age of Intelligence: Power, Policy & Innovation'

"AI helps me make better decisions, and be better informed. AI also has good personal applications... If this AI can turn me into a 'Murthy family level' physics tutor, then there's nothing it can't do."

Chris Lehane, Chief Global Affairs Officer, OpenAI on 'Open Questions with OpenAI'

"I think where we come from is a little bit more of an optimistic view. I mean, we are realists. We do build all sorts of safety mechanisms into our models before they are publicly released... how does society start to build resilience out there?"

Jay Puri, NVIDIA Executive Vice President, on 'Building the AI Stack of  the Future'

"Some jobs will be lost, and a lot of new jobs will be created... I believe AI is going to create more jobs and help the economy."

Pratyush Kumar, CEO and Co-founder, Sarvam AI on 'Creating in India,  For India'

"I think what we are trying to show is that India can, and that the proof of concept of deep tech in India is done. We can build it. It's now about figuring out how to have proof of scale and then taking it forward."

Deepak Dhanak, Co-founder and COO, Rocket, on 'Building the AI Stack: The India Advantage'

"I don't think AI or any tool will replace an individual. I think a person who understands and knows and uses these tools will replace the one that is not using them."

James Manyika, Senior Google Official, 'AI, Society and Impact: Shaping Inclusive and Equitable Futures'

"I think what I, what I hope we get to in 2030 is where, you know, we've hopefully collectively delivered on what I think of as the why of AI. Uh, and the why of AI, I think if you ask any of us, and hopefully people in the audience too who are working on AI, I think, you know, I would say we're, we're working on AI because of the potential we see in empowering people, empowering economies, advancing science, and solving societal challenges."

Vivek Anchalia, founder of Amazing Indian Stories and director of 'Naisha' on 'Tech Brings Huge Changes, But Creativity Still Human'

"Artificial intelligence functioned as a supporting layer and not a creative replacement."

Additional Voices from the Summit

Arvind Jain (Founder & CEO, Glean): "I think of AI as a tool that is available to us humans, and which is going to reduce the boring, repetitive work. It will also help leave more time for creative work for all of us."

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, mozilla.org): "I think sovereignty is important at every single level... I think it also matters down to the individual level."

Akis Evangelidis (Co-Founder and President, India, Nothing): "I think there's been a lot of confusion as well with AI. I think a lot of brands have lost the side of the end users for the sake of claiming AI features and so on. And to be honest, there is still a lot of uncertainty."

Mukund Jha (CEO, Emergent Labs): "Every time an application gets built on a platform, our agent self improve. We have a high-intensity, small but super strong engineering research team, and we ship really fast."

Vikram Vaidyanathan (Managing Director, Z47): "The only friction point is that the cost of inferencing is too high to be available on scale."

Ashutosh Sharma (Prosus): "Entrepreneurs need to understand that every sector is going to change. You need to figure out which actions you want to drive."

Manav Garg (Together Fund): "First thing we need to make sure that data is being used for India and only in India. We also need to compete on a business model within the countries and not just within companies."

Harshjit Sethi (Investor): "I think we just have to be cutting edge and marry capability with cost and context."

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder): "It's all the energy of India. I thought it would be big. It's bigger than that."

Dr Chandrika Kaushik (Director General, DRDO): "The amount of data that is available across the defence spectrum today is humanly impossible to crunch and make meaningful sense of in real time. This is where AI plays a leading role."

Ajai Chowdhry (Chairman, Mission Governing Board, National Quantum Mission Of India): "India will have enough SLMs (Small Language Models) within a year."

Paul Triolo, Partner, DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group: "There are more existential risks, for example, of an AI model taking somebody who doesn't have a PhD in biotechnology and enabling them to design a bioweapon. That's a real fear. So the companies are very aware of those kinds of risks and are taking steps to mitigate those."

Amit Zavery, President, Chief Product Officer and COO, ServiceNow: "The Covid moment took a lot of people by surprise. I don't think AI has been a surprise. We have been talking about AI for probably 10 years now. What's happening now is that a lot of the things are all starting to come together. Every part of any industry, look at it. And if you look at society, everybody's aware of it."

Nikhil Malhotra, Chief Innovation Officer, Tech Mahindra: "I think we're still at that stage where there's a lot of fallacy and myths being talked about that AI can rewrite and write software. From the lens that we look at it, there are two ways that you do."

Bir Singh, Co-founder & CSO, Addverb Technologies, on making technology affordable: "Technology will come into day-to-day use when it is affordable. Right? If we build something which is not affordable, then it will be good in videos, like, you know, in showcase, etc. But if it is affordable, it's a real use case."