Ethics, scale & speed: What India's AI leaders are signalling ahead of AI Summit
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Ahead of the upcoming AI Summit in Delhi, industry leaders have struck a confident but cautionary note on India’s artificial intelligence push, stressing upon the need to pair rapid deployment with strong ethical guardrails.
The themes of scale, responsibility, and trust carried into a pre-summit panel discussion featuring senior executives from NVIDIA, Microsoft , NASSCOM, and HCLTech , who argued that ethical AI is no longer an abstract debate but a business and leadership imperative.
The summit is going to be the fourth and biggest AI summit so far in the entire world.
Mandar Kulkarni, national technology and security officer for India and South Asia at Microsoft, said transparency must be treated as a non-negotiable principle. “You have to build security and compliance at all levels,” he said, adding that transparency underpins ethics, security, and trust. “You can’t be transparent if you are unethical. You can’t be transparent if you are not secure.”
Surprisingly, 'explainability' in AI was touched upon as critical for real-world adoption.
“We cannot implement something because the machine told us to do that,” Sundar R. Nagalingam, senior director at NVIDIA’s AI Consulting Partners said, pointing to examples such as loan rejections by AI. “Any behaviour has to be explained. Explainability is an extraordinarily complex thing when it comes to be implemented for a machine. So it, is very important for the successful rollout of the technology.”
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R. Chockalingam, head of AI at NASSCOM, framed the issue as one of human accountability and traceability. “Clear ownership for every deployed system, auditable decision pathways, and governance mechanisms that allow override or decommissioning are essential,” he said, especially as AI systems increasingly assess, optimise, and make decisions with real-world consequences.
Echoing that view, Govind Chandranani, practice head of Engineering and R&D Services at HCLTech, said accountability acts as the anchor for all other safeguards. “If you make somebody accountable, they will do everything else - safety, privacy, explainability,” he said.
Preceding the Summit, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, at a press conference, said that leading Indian IT companies have developed more than 200 sector-specific AI models, many of which are expected to be launched during the event. He added that nearly $70 billion has already been invested in the AI infrastructure layer, with the potential for this figure to double by the end of the Summit.
Vaishnaw also outlined a major push on talent, saying AI infrastructure access and industry-aligned curricula will be extended to 500 universities to build a steady pipeline of skilled professionals.
As India accelerates AI adoption across sectors, panelists agreed that embedding ethical discipline into innovation is not a brake on speed, but a prerequisite for sustainable scale.