The India AI Impact Summit (19–20 February 2026, New Delhi) builds on a global progression – from safety at Bletchley Park in 2023 and institutional frameworks in Seoul in 2024 to concrete action in Paris in 2025. The next phase now comes into focus: translating these milestones into safe and scalable AI adoption that delivers real-world impact in people’s lives. 

UNDP for more than 60 years has supported 170+ countries through successive technology waves, by listening to context, partnering across sectors, and delivering where impact matters most.  

Today, across its country offices, regional platforms, and global teams, UNDP is applying this same approach to artificial intelligence (AI) in line with its Strategic Plan 2026–2029, which positions AI and digital transformation as accelerators for human development on a healthy planet. This work is coordinated through dedicated global teams, including the Digital, AI and Innovation Hub and the AI Hub for Sustainable Development, which help drive coherence, quality, and scale across the organization. 

Drawing on its experience supporting governments and partners across diverse AI and digital transformation efforts, UNDP has seen that adoption is often as challenging as invention. Meaningful, long-term impact rarely comes from one-size-fits-all approaches. It depends on people-centred solutions that are grounded in context and shaped by language, institutions, infrastructure, and trust and safety. Scaling responsibly therefore depends on partnerships that strengthen the foundations of adoption and connect innovation to real needs across countries, particularly the Global South. Indeed, as experience in India and across countries shows, diffusion is often misunderstood as a question of speed. In reality, it is a question of learning, capability, and when responsibility is clearly owned at the institutional level, use cases can move from pilots to scale to become sources of lasting value in people’s lives.

UNDP, together with its partners, is building practical pathways for governments, innovators, and institutions to move from pilots to systems, and from promising ideas to practical solutions that can scale AI safely and sustainably. 

Co-architecting AI adoption for scalable impact 

In the lead-up to the India AI Impact Summit, UNDP is helping to build the AI Adoption Network, led by People + AI alongside partners in India. The Network is designed to identify common bottlenecks to adoption and to unlock the partnerships needed to scale responsible AI in practice. 

This effort builds on UNDP’s broader portfolio of AI support to the Global South, drawing on the work of the AI Hub for Sustainable Development, alongside AI Trust and Safety, AI Landscape Assessments, national strategy support, data and local language initiatives such as the Local Language Accelerator, and capacity-building through the AI Sprint. Together, these capabilities help anchor AI adoption in strong foundations, safeguards, and country priorities. 

UNDP invites governments, practitioners, innovators, and partners across countries to co-design this Network, together. 

By joining the AI Adoption Network, participants become part of a growing community of practitioners, policymakers, and innovators working to advance safe and scalable AI adoption. Members contribute real-world use cases, learn from peers facing similar challenges, and help shape shared frameworks and global conversations on what safe and scalable adoption looks like in practice. 

Winning ideas on how to scale networks receive compute through the AI Hub for Sustainable Development Compute Accelerator and invitation to the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi!

Co-design the Network with us: https://peopleplus.ai/ucaf