India must pursue indigenous AI development for defence, avoiding reliance on foreign AI models for sensitive military applications and ensuring the trustworthiness of AI systems.

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is framed as a platform to build trusted, domestic AI capabilities, with MeitY and the government coordinating stakeholders to strengthen the AI ecosystem.

Kaushik notes that while AI is widely adopted in daily life, most solutions are imported, underscoring the urgency for trusted domestic capabilities.

DRDO has rolled out two governance tools: the ETAI framework to enhance resilience of AI-enabled systems and a guidelines-based testing and verification framework for AI solutions.

The agency’s AI governance package includes the ETAI framework and a developer-focused checklist for validating and verifying defence AI tools.

In sum, DRDO’s two-framework approach aims to build reliability and safe deployment of AI across defence applications.

AI is increasingly embedded in DRDO solutions and moving toward edge deployment and battlefield use, signaling a push to rapidly integrate AI into defence capabilities.

This shift toward edge and battlefield deployment reflects DRDO’s broader effort to scale AI adoption across projects for operational environments.

The integration of AI across DRDO projects envisions rapid upscaling, with edge computing and battlefield deployment as core components.

The India-AI Impact Summit 2026 focuses on responsible AI governance, innovation ecosystems, digital public infrastructure, climate-conscious tech, and equitable access, organized around the People, Planet, and Progress pillars.

The summit will feature seven thematic working groups, co-chaired by Global North and Global South representatives, proposing ideas like AI Commons, trusted AI tools, and shared compute infrastructure, plus sector-specific AI use case compendiums.

Sessions will address AI safety, governance, data protection, sovereign AI, indigenous foundation models, and the role of startups, farmers, and small businesses in employment and skilling.