New Delhi, February 20, 2026 — The future of Artificial Intelligence will not be determined solely by breakthroughs in advanced models, but by the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and open network architectures that allow these innovations to reach billions.
This was the resounding consensus at a high-level panel during the fifth day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, where global tech leaders and policymakers convened to discuss how to take AI from isolated experimental pilots to population-scale deployment.
During the session titled “AI and Open Networks: Creating Impact at Scale,” experts explored how India’s unique approach—combining consent-based data systems, interoperable platforms, and open participation—has laid the groundwork for a massive AI rollout.
The panel examined real-world applications across healthcare, agriculture, and public service delivery. They emphasized that turning AI into a mass-use technology, rather than a specialist tool, requires three critical steps:
Reducing inference costs to make the technology affordable.
Simplifying user experiences through intuitive, agent-based interfaces.
Enabling multilingual access so linguistic barriers do not limit adoption.
A major highlight of the discussion was the indispensable role of DPI in feeding the data pipelines required for AI.
Sunil Wadhwani, Founder of Wadhwani AI, stressed this practicality during the panel. “You simply cannot build AI for the social sector without the kind of data and pipelines that DPI provides,” Wadhwani noted. He added that without India’s robust digital infrastructure, large-scale deployment “would never scale to the levels we are seeing today.”
In the healthcare sector, experts highlighted how India’s interconnected health data systems could serve as a blueprint for the world. Panelists stated that India has the potential to “immediately create a global reference model” for the ethical use of AI in medicine, with the ultimate goal of delivering sustainable, universal health coverage at scale.
The session concluded with a powerful takeaway: by combining open networks and DPI with low-cost, plug-and-play innovation frameworks, countries can build inclusive AI systems. This approach promises to turn AI into a shared capability for global development, rather than an advantage concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.
Source: Press Release:Press Information Bureau