AI Not A Luxury But A Necessity For Inclusive Growth: Founders at India AI Impact Summit In Delhi

Leading startup founders and experts on Monday said that artificial intelligence (AI) is not a luxury but a necessity, which will make service delivery easier for the masses in India, as the country kicked off the five-day 'India AI Impact Summit 2026' here.

Speaking to IANS on the sidelines of the mega event, Ankit Modi, founding member and Chief Product Officer at healthcare company Qure.ai, said that due to a large population, there is a lot of potential for AI development in India.

"AI is not a luxury but a necessity. We need to reach a large number of people, but there are not enough experts in the country. When AI is integrated with existing expertise, it will help reach more people," Modi told IANS.

About Qure.ai, a company that is revolutionising the healthcare industry with AI-driven solutions, Modi said AI will bring huge benefits to India.

"We've seen that when we run state-level pilot projects or healthcare pilots with public health systems, we're able to detect 35 per cent more TB patients. This is incredibly important not only for the patient but also for their loved ones, friends, and family," he said, sharing the global impact of AI in medical imaging across 100 countries.

Abilash Soundararajan, Founder and CEO of PrivaSapien, told IANS that AI is growing rapidly in India amid supportive government policies.

"This is due to consumers' increasing reliance on AI. Consequently, AI will become crucial for all industries. It will significantly reduce the cost of doing business and significantly increase productivity," Soundararajan noted.

PrivaSapien is a unified privacy engineering platform that helps businesses visualise privacy risk, simulate privacy attacks and mitigate privacy risk for data collaboration and analytics.

According to Harish Amravatkar, who came from Silicon Valley in the US and is planning to kickstart an AI startup called Atlanto AI, said that currently, India is a place where it's easy to start a startup and scale it to a global level.

"This summit will provide young people with an opportunity to meet experienced people. This is a great opportunity for us," he added.

Narayanan Vaidyanathan, Global Head of Policy Development at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), told IANS that "This is a very good summit. More than 100 countries are here. This is very important given the current times. This will strengthen the partnership between academic institutions and industry."