Takeaways from the AI Impact Summit 2026 and HealthAI Welcomes Newest Global Regulatory Network Member
News from Manila and Notes from New Delhi: Towards a bolder, more inclusive future
Last month in New Delhi, I had the opportunity to attend the AI Impact Summit 2026, a milestone moment not only for global AI governance but also for the future of AI in health. For the first time, this global summit series came to the Global South.
India welcomed more than 100 countries, heads of state, international organizations, innovators, and citizens in what was intentionally framed as a “people’s summit”. That shift matters – it signals a broader turn in the global AI conversation, away from closed discussions centered primarily on safety and toward a more inclusive focus on access, development, diffusion, and real-world impact. That shift was visible throughout the summit. Earlier editions were defined largely by safety. In New Delhi, the emphasis moved more decisively toward implementation and societal value. The New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, signed by 92 countries, reflected this change by calling for a more balanced path, one that addresses risk while also recognizing the urgency for countries to build sovereign, trusted, and locally relevant AI capacity.
For those of us working in health, the clearest signal came from India’s launch of two foundational pillars: SAHI, the national Strategy for AI in Healthcare for India, and BODH, a federated benchmarking platform designed to validate health AI models on real-world data while protecting patient privacy.
What makes this moment especially significant is that ambition is being matched with infrastructure. Too often, national AI for health strategies remain aspirational. India’s approach feels different. It is anchored in India’s active digital public infrastructure (DPI), from the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) to interoperable health records at scale. India is not only articulating a vision. It is building the conditions to deliver it.
One principle in particular stayed with me: “Innovation over restraint”. Among SAHI’s governing sutras is the view that responsible innovation in healthcare should prioritize overall benefit rather than default to cautionary restraint. It is a bold position, and one that will shape important debates in the years ahead. It also reflects a challenge many countries are now confronting: how to enable innovation without relying on governance models that are perceived as too rigid, too slow, or too detached from local realities.
Across the health discussions I joined, several themes resurfaced: adaptive regulatory architectures, evidence-generating sandboxes, competency-based accountability, and a shift from evaluating models in isolation to evaluating their real-world impact on systems.
That is why I am especially looking forward to returning to New Delhi in April to begin the next phase of our collaboration with India through our Global Regulatory Network (which was just joined by the Philippines by the way – read more below). Working alongside ICMR, CDSCO, IndiaAI, and their partners, we will help turn the promise of SAHI and BODH into practical pathways for implementation. Central to this effort is finding the right balance: shaping an adaptive governance approach that keeps innovation safe and trustworthy, while also agile enough to scale. This is not only about enabling responsible AI adoption. It is about creating the conditions to reimagine health and care altogether. And because of India’s leadership, scale, and commitment to building governance models rooted in local realities, this work has the potential to inform AI in health strategies far beyond India, across the Global South. For HealthAI, this is where our mission becomes tangible: helping countries move from vision to execution, and from principles to governance systems that are safe, effective, and equitable in practice.
As the AI summit comes to Switzerland in 2027, one thing is already clear: The center of gravity in AI governance is expanding. In health, that shift will not simply influence the future – It will help define it. HealthAI’s ambition is to play its pivotal part in it, for the greater good.
