Next week (February 16–20), New Delhi will host the India AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam. This landmark event represents the first major global AI summit led by the Global South, signaling a shift in geopolitical influence over technology policy.
• Strategic Focus: Under the "Three Sutras"—People, Planet, and Progress—the summit aims to move beyond safety theory toward measurable social outcomes.
• Key Objectives: Central to the discussions is the India AI Mission, a $1.2 billion initiative to develop indigenous Large Language Models (LLMs) and compute infrastructure tailored for healthcare, agriculture, and inclusive growth.
• High-Level Participation: The assembly includes over 100 nations and executive leadership from NVIDIA, Google, and OpenAI, focusing on democratizing AI access rather than consolidating it within a few Western hubs.
The competitive landscape of consumer AI was fundamentally reshaped this quarter by the formal alliance between Apple and Google.
• The Integration: Apple has integrated a custom version of Google’s Gemini 3 architecture into its ecosystem to power the next generation of Siri.
• Rationale: Internal data indicated that proprietary models were struggling with complex, multi-step reasoning. By leveraging Gemini’s trillion-parameter capabilities, Apple has prioritized immediate user utility over the costly "arms race" of building foundational models entirely in-house.
• Privacy Innovation: To maintain its brand promise, Apple utilizes Private Cloud Compute (PCC)—a stateless infrastructure that allows Gemini to process complex queries without Google ever gaining access to persistent user data.
2026 marks the definitive transition from "Copilots" (assistants that suggest) to "Agents" (systems that act).
• Autonomous Workflows: Unlike previous iterations, today’s agentic systems can execute end-to-end tasks—such as procurement, lead generation, and cross-platform scheduling— without human intervention.
• Operational Impact: Recent reports from Thomson Reuters indicate that 15% of professional services firms have already deployed agentic tools, with another 53% in the planning stages. The focus has shifted from "prompt engineering" to "agent orchestration."
AI is increasingly moving out of the cloud and into the physical world.
• Robotics: Companies like Figure and Tesla have moved into high-mix manufacturing deployment, where robots use "physical intelligence" to learn manual tasks via visual observation rather than rigid programming.
• Edge AI: Advancements in hardware have made "Micro-Intelligence" standard. Highperformance reasoning now occurs locally on smartphones and wearables, reducing latency and enhancing privacy for real-time translation and environmental awareness.
The current state of AI is one of pragmatic integration. As capital expenditure from "Big Tech" is projected to hit $650 billion this year, the industry's focus has narrowed on ROI, autonomous task execution, and ethical governance.