Five days at the India AI Impact Summit

Five days at Bharat Mandapam, and the first time we put a booth on a floor this size. What we expected was a lot of explaining. What actually happened is that people wanted to watch a coworker run a job end to end, and then ask what it would do with their data.

Demos are a good filter. It is easy to nod along to a description of an AI coworker and quite hard to stay interested if the thing cannot do anything. Running Vikram and Maya live, on the floor, in front of people who had every reason to be sceptical, turned out to be the most useful thing we did all week.

What we took away

• —Nobody argued about whether AI can do the work. The questions were all about control: what it does without asking, and what it brings back for a decision.
• —The founders we spoke to were not shopping for another dashboard. Several said outright that they had bought tools nobody had the hours to run.
• —Policy conversations and product conversations are converging. The Open Source AI and Plurality Imperative sessions had the same themes we hear from operators.
• —A booth is a forcing function. You cannot hide behind a deck when the product is running two feet away.

Thank you to everyone who came by, argued with us, and asked the hard version of the question. That is the useful kind of visitor.