At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, French leader Emmanuel Macron opened with ‘Namaste,’ thanking his Indian hosts for the warm welcome in this vibrant nation following his 2024 visit. He then unveiled a poignant narrative of Mumbai’s informal sector to showcase India’s digital prowess.
Imagine a street hawker a decade back, barred from banking due to missing IDs. Now, that vendor thrives with frictionless digital payments across India using just his mobile. ‘This is the story of a civilization,’ Macron proclaimed, not a mere tech tale.
Spotlighting India’s groundbreaking infrastructure, he noted the world’s first digital ID system for 1.4 billion, a payments network handling 20 billion transactions per month, and a health ecosystem with 500 million digital IDs. No other nation matches this ambition.
He referenced their shared Paris AI Action Summit legacy, forging global AI ethics to boost human-centric advances in medicine, energy, mobility, agriculture, and governance. With AI turning into fierce competition and tech behemoths expanding, India’s strategy stands out: Sovereign AI via targeted language models and empowering startups with 38,000 subsidized GPUs.
Macron ended by flipping the vendor story into a broader challenge. Global naysayers once dismissed India’s mass digitization; reality proved them wrong. Now, as AI elitism grows, he urged collaborative defiance from India, France, Europe, and partners—merging tech innovation with ethical responsibility to craft an inclusive AI era.