FEBRUARY 18, 2026
Former UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak says India poised to be leader in AI
New Delhi: India’s emphasis on large-scale adoption of Artificial Intelligence places it among the world’s emerging AI leaders, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Wednesday, speaking at a Carnegie & Observer Research Foundation event on AI in New Delhi.
Speaking at the event, ‘AI for All: Reimagining Global Cooperation’, Sunak said the focus should shift from which country invents AI technology to how countries deploy the technology for societal benefit.
“India is well-positioned to be a leader in AI and actually demonstrate mass adoption and deployment in society,” Sunak told a packed audience.
Talking about India’s place in the global AI scene, he said the country’s talent pool, digital public infrastructure, and an optimistic public response to AI placed it in a good position.
“By focusing on mass adoption here, I think India is well positioned to be a leader in AI,” he said, adding that such deployment offered “the way that you are going to bring the most impact to the most people.”
Talking about summits across the world, Sunak said, “There were summits on every single topic that you could imagine… but there wasn’t a summit to discuss what I thought was the most transformative technology of our lifetimes,” he said. “AI is a general-purpose technology… and we’re lucky to live at a time when this technology has come along.”
On why he broadened the diplomatic approach to include frontier AI companies, Sunak said cutting-edge research happened outside government laboratories. “…research at the frontier was happening in these companies. It wasn’t happening inside government R&D labs. So, they needed to be at the table, alongside leaders.”
Despite initial skepticism on whether political leaders and tech innovators could meaningfully engage, his experiment succeeded, Sunak noted.
Referencing his lack of a technical background, he said, “I don’t have a STEM background, much to my parents’ great distress… If I can survive family dinner with my in-laws, I can survive the summit.” He added that his wife’s uncle is an astrophysics professor, his brother-in-law holds a computer science PhD, and his father-in-law founded a software company.
Beyond praise for India’s ecosystem, Sunak used the Carnegie & Observer Research Foundation platform to outline what he described as the core challenge of the AI era—building public trust.
He contrasted the upbeat reception to AI in India and the Global South with—what he called—a more anxious mood in Western nations.
“Here in India, there is incredible optimism and trust… whereas in the West the overriding feeling is one of anxiety,” he said.
The unease, he added, was tied to concerns about jobs and economic disruption—challenges that required active policy responses.
“AI is going to change the labour market. Some jobs will go. Many more will be redesigned,” he said. “The role of government is not to stop the innovation, but it’s to support people to take on these new tasks, new roles with confidence and security.”
With that, Sunak called for education reform, wider digital literacy, and workforce re-skilling as part of that effort.
He also stressed public sector adoption of AI to build trust. When citizens encounter AI delivering tangible improvements—“better healthcare, more effective government services, faster response times from the state”—he said that the abstract debate about trust would become grounded in real experience.
Sunak pointed to India’s digital infrastructure, from identity systems to payment networks and health accounts, calling them “distribution rails”, with the products AI-enabled to scale to reach hundreds of millions of users.
“If you’re doing something in India, you’re doing something in a place where people are hungry, excited, they’re positive to use it to get the benefits of it,” he said.
While acknowledging the risks and complexities of rapid technological change, Sunak closed his speech on a philosophical note on the human role in an AI-augmented world.
“AI will have an enormous amount of knowledge, but we should never forget knowledge is not the same as wisdom,” he said, urging both policymakers and societies to keep human judgment at the centre of technological progress.
Courtesy/Source: ThePrint / PTI
