French President Emmanuel Macron, while addressing the AI Impact Summit 2026 on Thursday, praised India for playing a key role in democratising Digital Public Infrastructure.
"Ten years ago, a street vendor could not open a bank account in Mumbai, but today he can accept payments online. No address, no papers, no access, and today the same vendor accepts payments on his phone. India has built something no other country has built, a digital identity for 1.4 billion people," Macron said.
"India built something that no other country in the world has built. A digital identity for 1.4 billion people. A payment system that now processes 20 billion transactions every month. A health infrastructure that has issued 500 million digital health IDs. Here are the results. They call it the India Stack Open Interoperable Sovereign. That is what this summit is about. We are clearly at the beginning of a huge acceleration, and you perfectly described it during your interventions," he added.
"Last year, when France and India co-hosted the AI Action Summit in Paris, we set a global guiding principle for technologies that would transform our societies and our economies. We say that Artificial Intelligence will be an enabler for our humanity to innovate faster, to disrupt healthcare, energy, mobility, agriculture, and public services for the good of mankind. Both of us, we do believe in this revolution. AI has become a major field of strategic competition, and big tech got even bigger," he said.
Macron praised India's use of technology to ensure the good of citizens and said that the future of AI will be for those who combine technology with humanity.
"AI, GPU, chips are now directly translated into geopolitical and macroeconomic terms. Some time for the best, some time for the worst, I have to say. One year ago, we demonstrated something else... India made a deliberate sovereign choice, SML, small language models. Task-specific, designed to run on a smartphone, India built the first government-funded AI and deployed 38,000 GPUs at the cheapest rates to every startup in the country," he said.
"I started with a story about a street vendor in Mumbai. Ten years ago, the world told India that 1.4 billion people could not be brought into the digital economy. India proved them wrong. Today, some say AI is a game only the biggest can play...India, France, Europe, together with our partners, those who believe in our approach, companies, governments, investors, might have a different way...The future of AI will be built by those who combine innovation and responsibility, technology with humanity, and India and France will help to shape this future together," he added.
The India AI Impact Summit, the first global AI summit to be hosted in the Global South, aims to reflect on the transformative potential of AI, aligning with the national vision of "Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya" (welfare for all, happiness for all) and the global principle of AI for Humanity.
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