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Shaping a Pro-Human AI Future: GSI’s Key Takeaways from the India AI Impact Summit

Event Report Mateo Rodriguez

For the first time, a major global AI convening was hosted in the Global South. The India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi last February drew participation on a scale that reflected what that shift means – over 600,000 people, from policymakers to practitioners, engaged across its proceedings. The ambition was equally large to make “AI for All” a governance reality rather than a conference slogan. With the next global AI summit set for Switzerland in 2027, the window for turning that ambition into architecture is open, but it will require coordinated action across governments, research institutions, and civil society that the global community has so far fallen short of achieving. 

GSI attended as part of its ongoing joint initiative with the Project Liberty Institute (PLI) on digital infrastructure governance. Director Vidisha Mishra and Strategic Outreach Manager Mateo Rodriguez represented the organization across three days of convenings, bringing with them the preliminary findings of a research project, “Building Digital Infrastructure for the AI Era: Insights from Middle Power States“ that has involved in-depth interviews with senior policymakers across over a dozen middle power states, including Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, and South Africa.  

Our findings underscore that Middle powers are transitioning from the mere technical deployment of digital services to acting as proactive market shapers. In essence, they are encoding their governance philosophies, social contracts, and economic incentives directly into the digital stack. By embedding pro-human values into the foundational architecture, they can ensure that emerging AI ecosystems serve the public interest. These insights underpinned our engagements at the Summit, highlighting that in the AI era, digital infrastructure design is the primary lever for ensuring societies remain governable, secure, and informed.

Three Days of Action: GSI and Partners on the Global Stage 

We structured our engagement around the conviction that AI and digital infrastructure governance is too consequential to be left to any single country or corporation to tackle alone. Together with a diverse group of partners, we hosted three strategic convenings on the ground: 

  1. Building Trust in the Infrastructure: We kicked off the week with an official main-stage session, “Building Trust: Digital Infrastructure Fit for the AI Era” co-organized with PLI and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Featuring a diverse panel – Vidisha Mishra (GSI), Dr. Arvind Gupta (Digital India Foundation), Dr. Tomicah Tillemann (PLI), Robert Opp (UNDP), and Dr. Supheakmungkol Sarin (AI Safety Asia) – the discussions focused on the operationalization of public interest in emerging tech stacks. A consensus emerged that democratic values cannot be retrofitted onto digital infrastructure as an afterthought. Instead, transparency, accountability, and openness must be treated as core architectural requirements rather than secondary compliance add-ons.
  2. On February 17, GSI convened a multi-stakeholder roundtable, “Collective AI Governance: Multilateral Approaches for a Fragmented World,” co-hosted with PLI, the Aapti Institute, and Chatham House. The discussion featured a diverse cohort of global experts, including Henri Verdier (INRIA Foundation), Isabella Wilkinson (Chatham House), Joseph Carroll (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, UK), PeiChin Tay (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change), Benjamin Prud’homme (Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), Vinay Narayan (Aapti Institute), and Anna Tumadóttir (Creative Commons). The working group focused on mitigating governance fragmentation through the implementation of “governance labs” regional regulatory sandboxes designed to pilot and refine policy tools prior to global scaling. This provides a modular, evidence-based approach to international cooperation offers a practical approach to a challenge that is largely treated as a matter of political will alone. 
  3. Advancing the Role of Government as an Active Steward: The final session, a high-level roundtable titled “Steering DPI & AI Innovation Towards Public Value Maximization,” was co-organized with the Australian Government and IT for Change. This exchange featured strategic insights from State-Secretary Alexander Pröll (Federal Chancellery of the Government of Austria), Daniel Buckley (Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), Tomicah Tillemann (PLI), as well as Anita Gurumurthy and Sadhana Sanjay (IT for Change). The working group emphasized the necessity of governments acting as active stewards of the digital commons. A primary recommendation was the strategic use of public procurement frameworks to incentivize the development and adoption of safe, trustworthy, and open-source AI, shaping the market toward the public good. 

Four Strategic Takeaways

Drawing from our summit engagements and the wider PLI-GSI joint digital infrastructure initiative, walked away with four reflections for a more equitable digital era: 

  1. Infrastructure as the Foundation of Governance: AI and digital infrastructure are inseparable; effective governance is impossible without securing the underlying layers of compute and connectivity. While the New Delhi Declaration identifies robust infrastructure as a prerequisite, middle powers must achieve strategic optionality when designing their digital infrastructure to avoid vendor lock-in and technological dependency. 
  2. Encoding Human Flourishing into the Tech Stack: To avoid repeating the extractive mistakes of the current “platform era” of the internet, states must build a pro-human AI stack that embeds transparency and agency at the architectural level. Prioritizing data agency over surveillance-based models allows governments to ensure that technology empowers citizens, rather than serving private shareholder interests.
  3. Transitioning from Declarations to Delivery: The global community has reached a saturation point for high-level frameworks; the priority is now operationalizing implementation. While the New Delhi Declaration successfully articulates critical pillars for international cooperation, its voluntary nature requires a shift toward practical assurance mechanisms –such as cross-border auditing and certification – to turn shared principles into measurable global standards.
  4. Capacity Building as a Litmus Test for Legitimacy: For international governance to be legitimate, it must move beyond symbolic inclusion toward deep investment in the technical capacity of public institutions. Institutional agility depends on the ability of regulators, particularly in the Global South, to effectively audit and implement the rules they write. Scaling up access to compute and human capital is the only way to move from symbolic inclusion to active stewardship. 

The Road to Switzerland  2027

The New Delhi mandate is clear – “AI for All” means the trajectory of AI and digital infrastructure cannot be dictated by a narrow set of countries or companies. As we approach the 2027 AI Summit in Switzerland, GSI remains dedicated to sustaining this global policy momentum together with our partners Through the integration of multilateral engagement at global fora and evidence-based research – such as our joint initiative with PLI – we aim to contribute to building a digital ecosystem that expands opportunity to the underserved, fosters genuine competition, promotes the common good, and keeps humans at the center.