PM Modi chairs roundtable with AI startups ahead of February summit

Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a roundtable meeting with Artificial Intelligence startups and firms in Delhi on Thursday, January 8, 2026, ahead of the India AI Impact Summit in February.

A dozen companies that Mr. Modi met, including Tech Mahindra and Sarvam AI, were the ones that qualified for the “AI for ALL: Global Impact Challenge” competition. Applications were invited last year for initiatives that could “create large-scale impact” in agriculture, education, health, climate and finance.

Twenty teams selected as per the competition’s call for applications will be able to present their work in the presence of heads of state from France (which hosted the previous AI Action Summit) and other countries at the February summit, which the government says will have more than 1 lakh participants.

A statement from the Prime Minister’s Office said Mr. Modi “emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in transforming society.”

“He stated that India will host the India Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit next month and thus the country will play an important role in the technology sector. He emphasized that India is making efforts to achieve a transformation with artificial intelligence and benefit from artificial intelligence.”

IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of State for IT Jitin Prasada and IT Secretary S. Krishnan were also present at the roundtable.

“These initiatives work across a wide range of areas, including Indian language base models, multilingual large language models, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and text-to-video; 3D content using generative AI for e-commerce, marketing, and personalized content creation; engineering simulations, materials research, and advanced analytics for data-driven decision-making across industries; healthcare diagnostics and medical research.”

Mr Modi also said the PMO had a “need to ensure that Indian AI models are ethical, impartial, transparent and based on data privacy principles”. Other companies present at the roundtable meeting were Avataar, BharatGen (a fully government-funded project under the Ministry of Science and Technology), Fractal, Gan, Genloop, Gnani, Intellihealth, Shodh AI, Soket AI and Zenteiq.