New York: A global Artificial Intelligence summit being hosted in New Delhi signals to the world that India is serious about AI and will provide opportunities to spur interesting collaborations, an eminent Indian-American business leader has said.
Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon, a distinguished philanthropist and Grammy-award winning artist, described efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government to prioritise AI as “stunningly impressive.”
“I applaud this whole notion that we are trying to use AI to benefit all sectors of society, and that has been a stated goal of ‘Viksit Bharat’ and all of the broader initiatives,” Tandon told PTI in an exclusive interview here Tuesday.
New Delhi is set to host the India AI Impact Summit 2026 on February 16-20. The Summit, announced by Prime Minister Modi at the France AI Action Summit, will be the first-ever global AI summit hosted in the Global South and will focus on the principles of ‘People, Planet, and Progress’.
Noting that the AI Summit is bringing together government, industry, leading names in academia from different parts of the world, Tandon said “this is an opportunity to not just have conversations in the formal agenda, but the informal interactions that get built as a result of this are going to spur a lot of interesting collaborations and innovation.”
“It also signals to the world that India is serious about AI. Given the demographic dividend that we have as a country, it's a tremendous opportunity for India to leverage that and give gifts to the world. Because I think India's learning will not be contained within India. Everyone can learn from it,” she said.
Just a few weeks before the summit, Tandon and her husband Ranjan Tandon exchanged a Memorandum of Understanding with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) for the establishment of the Krishnamurthy Tandon School of Artificial Intelligence at the prestigious institution.
The School will be established through a generous endowment of 100 crore rupees by Tandon, an alumna of IIMA’s Class of 1975, and her husband.
She termed the establishment of the dedicated school of Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad as a “real milestone for India” and underlined that learnings in India about translational AI will hold deep relevance for the world.
“This will create a school of data science and AI at IIM Ahmedabad, my alma mater, and it is going to be the first-of-its-kind in a management institution. I think it's a real milestone for India. The focus of this School will be on translational research to look at how AI is going to affect different segments of management, different functions in management, and different industrial verticals,” she said.
“From agriculture to healthcare to education, this will really look at what are the specific problems and what is AI going to do towards that,” she said.
“The research around translational issues and challenges, defining the problems, asking questions and harnessing data for that is where I think real breakthroughs are going to happen. And what we learn in India is going to be relevant to the world in more than one way,” she said.
The MoU was exchanged on January 29 this year in the presence of Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan and Ambassador Vinay Kwatra virtually in the US.
Pradhan had said that the MoU in the lead-up to the India—AI Impact Summit 2026 is a "solid reflection” of the concrete actions the country is taking to become a global AI superpower.
He also expressed confidence that the Krishnamurthy Tandon School of Artificial Intelligence will work towards “boosting India’s AI capabilities, democratising AI, creating jobs from India for the global AI economy and harnessing AI for creating a global impact in improving lives and advancing social good.”
A former partner at McKinsey, Tandon is the founder of strategic advisory and investment firm Tandon Capital Associates. She was also chair of the Board of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, named after a generous gift of $100 million from her and her husband for engineering at NYU.
Ranjan Tandon is an IIT Kanpur and Harvard Business School alumnus and founder and chairman of Libra Advisors.
Outlining the vision for the School, Tandon emphasized that the initiative will have a core focus on F.I.R.E - with the themes of foundational work about creating partnerships, impact, research and education.
“There's going to be a lot of focus on creating a new kind of thinker...we have to now teach people about critical thinking, ethical thinking, emotional thinking. Those are some of the issues that are going to change governance and management,” she said adding that AI is going to be upending many functions and the future of work is going to be different.
“Ultimately, the goal of all this is to be able to help solve challenges for India and make it accessible. If we have great leaders, they can make better techniques available to the rest of their organisations, the country, the society,” she said.
Tandon also highlighted that the School is also “hoping to create very interesting partnerships with other institutions. This is not a competition. This is a cooperative strategic strategy for the betterment of education in India.”
“AI is redefining territories, redefining business, redefining society. It's a genie that's come out of the bottle. It's not something we're going to contain. So we're going to have to think very carefully about impact - impact on security, productivity and on the future of work,” she said.
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