Mittal, Narayen champion open AI standards and content authenticity

AI must remain open, trusted, and globally accessible rather than concentrated in a few hands, industry leaders said at the India AI Impact Summit, highlighting India’s potential role in shaping global AI norms.

Sunil Mittal, founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises, said AI is already becoming central to telecom operations. “From our company’s standpoint, AI is becoming a really integral part of how we operate, serve customers, and build our networks,” he said, adding that sectors such as healthcare, education, and medical sciences “will flourish on the back of this.”

Shantanu Narayen, chairman and CEO of Adobe, said India is likely to see one of the world’s largest AI user bases. “Given that the number of people using AI in India will be greater than anywhere else in the world in a few years, the leadership role India can play—not just in what these models mean, but in how we think about data, privacy, security, and trust—is significant,” he said.

A key concern, Narayen added, is authenticity in the age of generative AI. “I want every piece of information that’s produced to carry provenance and a watermark so that people can clearly distinguish what is real from what is fake,” he said, referring to safeguards around synthetic content.

On open standards, Mittal questioned whether leading AI developers might keep systems tightly controlled. Narayen acknowledged “the inevitable tension between commercial enterprises that want to keep information proprietary and the need to do good for humanity,” calling it an ongoing challenge.

He argued that long-term advantage would not lie solely in owning models. “Sustainable advantage, over time, cannot rest only on the model. It has to be in the use cases—what people are actually doing with that model,” he said, citing Adobe’s support for open standards such as PDF.

Expressing confidence in India’s trajectory, Narayen said he was “far more confident about what will happen in India” than in many other parts of the world, pointing to the country’s scale, connectivity, and frugal innovation mindset.