New Delhi, February 17 (IANS). Many senior leaders and leaders from the country and the world were present on the second day of ‘India AI Impact Summit 2026’ held in the national capital. Meanwhile, Ranjana Chopra, Additional Secretary and Financial Advisor in the Ministry of Culture, in a special conversation with news agency IANS said that this summit is giving a great opportunity to various ministries, startups and private companies to showcase their AI innovations. He said that the Ministry of Tribal Affairs has recently developed a digital solution through which content can be translated into four tribal languages. This initiative has received a very positive response at the Summit and many agencies have shown interest in it.
He further said that this summit is also very useful for the youth, because here they can see AI solutions developed for their everyday problems. This platform also provides them with inspiration, networking and employment opportunities.
Meanwhile, COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India) Director General Lieutenant General Dr. SP Kochhar, while talking about the role of AI in the telecom sector, said that the entire operation of AI depends on the telecom network. Data is stored in the data center, but the work of transporting it is done only through the telecom network. He said the commercial benefits have not yet been fully realized on 5G networks, but AI is a technology that will create huge opportunities for 5G.
He said that the AI applications being showcased at the summit are useful for the common people and increasing their consumption will also benefit the telecom network. In the coming time, AI based services on 5G network will make the network more capable.
Dr. Kochhar stressed that it is very important to provide strong network to remote rural areas. Without connectivity, AI cannot work there. Therefore, it is the responsibility of both the government and the industry to provide facilities like fiberisation and ‘Right of Way’ (ROW) to every village.
He said that when the network reaches every part of the country, then AI based services will also reach there and people will be able to work from home, as is possible in big cities today. In the coming times, AI will play an important role in the development of the country.
Apart from this, while speaking to IANS at the summit, Radha Ramaswamy Basu, CEO and Founder of IMERIT, said that now the next phase of AI is to move beyond large models and make them capable of real use. He said that big companies have created big AI models, but now the real challenge is to connect human expertise to these models. He called this as ‘expert in the loop’ or ‘human in the loop’, who will play the most important role in the times to come.
He said that now going beyond general AI models, objective based (domain-based) solutions will be developed for specific areas like insurance, healthcare and agriculture. Especially in the agricultural sector, AI tools like small language models and vision models can prove to be very useful for the society.
Radha Basu told that her company has been working in the field of AI for the last eight years and has created 9,500 to 10,000 jobs in India. He said that the knowledge of experts like mathematicians, insurance experts, cardiologists, chartered accountants makes the AI model better. Giving an example, he said that if AI is to be created in the field of accounting, then the expertise of a chartered accountant will be necessary, because the AI model itself does not have this knowledge.
–IANS
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