NEW DELHI, February 17 — G20 Sherpa and former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant on Tuesday emphasized that while artificial intelligence is set to disrupt every sector and way of life, its evolution must be guided by three pillars: accessibility, affordability, and accountability.
He warned that without a framework built on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), artificial intelligence risks creating a deeply unequal global society.
Speaking on the second day of the India AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Kant highlighted what he described as a significant disparity in how large language models are currently trained, noting that the Global South, particularly India, plays a major role in supplying data.
“The important thing is that today we in India — if you look at OpenAI’s ChatGPT — we are providing more data than the United States of America, 33% more data than what the United States does,” Kant said.
He argued that for AI to be truly inclusive, it must move beyond English-centric models and become natively multilingual to serve diverse populations.
“These large language models are getting better and better on the basis of data from the Global South. It is essential that this contribution translates into benefits for these regions,” he said.
Drawing parallels to India’s financial inclusion success, Kant suggested that AI development should follow the blueprint of the country’s Digital Public Infrastructure, which he said enabled India to achieve decades of developmental progress in just seven years.
“Our digital ecosystem worked because our models were open-sourced. My view is that there has to be a layer of digital public identity in AI, on top of which we should allow the private sector to open and compete,” he said.
Kant was speaking during a session titled “AI for India’s Next Billion: Intergenerational Insights for Inclusive and Future-Ready Growth.” Other panelists included Amandeep Singh Gill of the United Nations, Arunabha Ghosh of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, Claire Melamed of the UN Foundation, Kunalika Gautam of the UN Foundation, Ruchira Goyal of Sustainable Food Systems, and Safiya Husain of Karya.
The former NITI Aayog CEO added that meaningful social transformation can be achieved by leveraging AI technologies to address grassroots challenges in health care, education, and agriculture.
Reflecting on the West’s economic trajectory following World War II, Kant cautioned that progress does not automatically guarantee equity. He warned that the current wave of large-scale AI investment could lead to a highly unequal society if the technology remains concentrated in the hands of a few.
“If we end up creating an unequal society, we have failed,” Kant said, stressing that the ultimate goal should be to improve the lives of citizens in the Global South rather than merely increasing the valuation of major technology companies.
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