Regional AI Impact Summit 2025, Odisha
Event Highlights
Sushant Kumar and Ananya Mukherjee from the Kalpa Impact team were at the Regional AI Impact Summit 2025, Odisha.
Thanks to Dr. Saurabh Garg, Secretary, MoSPI and India Co-Chair of the “Democratising AI Resources” working group, for the opportunity.
Together with EkStep Foundation, we hosted a discussion covering the full stack, ranging from the foundational elements of connectivity, data, compute, talent, and most importantly, how AI solves real human needs.
Insights that stood out
- Regional Collaboration: There is a clear need and appetite for countries to collaborate on AI resources and learning. The massive gap in resource accessibility and affordability, especially for compute resources, can be bridged through collective effort. The IndiaAI Mission is a tangible step in that direction.
- AI Resource + Problem Solving: AI resources are necessary but not sufficient for shaping the arc of AI development and adoption for public purpose. AI’s impact will be determined by how it shows up in solving for healthcare, education, agriculture, livelihoods, and public services at scale.
- Multilingual AI: Access to context-specific and multilingual datasets will provide the ability to build for communities in their language. However, most AI language models today are trained on datasets from a limited number of high-resource languages, primarily English.
- Public Purpose: Starting from “what problems are we solving” and building (and testing) with community participation, and safeguards, will be key to making AI useful, trusted, resilient, and inclusive.
We were joined by some incredibly insightful speakers and panelists. Thanks to Amit Shukla, Jt Secretary, MEA, Ahmed Hefnawy, representing Dr. Hoda Baraka, Egypt Co-Chair, Manu Chopra of Karya and Santosh Kevlani, and Vidyasagar Sk from the EkStep Foundation.
Thanks to the IndiaAI team for their collaboration and support including Khushal Wadhawan, Arjun Gargeyas, Dipankar Rath, Suyash Gaur, Tanvi, and others.