New Delhi, Feb 19 (UNI) French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday praised India as a "civilisational" force in the global artificial intelligence race, telling a landmark AI summit in New Delhi that the future of the technology would belong to nations that pair "innovation with responsibility, technology with humanity."
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, the first major AI gathering hosted in the Global South, Macron opened with a striking image, "A street vendor in Mumbai who, a decade ago, had no bank account, no address on record, and no access to formal finance, but today same vendor accepts digital payments on his phone India has built something no other country has built, a digital identity for 1.4 billion people."
The French president argued that India had done what the world once said was impossible, pulling 1.4 billion people into the digital economy. The country now runs a payments infrastructure processing "20 billion transactions every month" and has issued "500 million digital health IDs," he noted.
"They call it the India Stack Open Interoperable Sovereign. That is what this summit is about. We are clearly at the beginning of a huge acceleration, and you perfectly described it during your interventions," he added.
Macron underscored artificial intelligence's role as a transformative force for human progress, pointing to last year's AI Action Summit in Paris, co-hosted by France and India, as a turning point in setting global norms for the technology.
"Last year, when France and India co-hosted the AI Action Summit in Paris, we set a global guiding principle for technologies that would transform our societies and our economies," he said. "We say that Artificial Intelligence will be an enabler for our humanity to innovate faster, to disrupt healthcare, energy, mobility, agriculture, and public services for the good of mankind. Both of us, we do believe in this revolution."
He then stressed that AI has become a major field of strategic competition, and "big tech got even bigger."
The French president, however, struck a cautionary note, warning that the promise of AI had been accompanied by an alarming concentration of power. "AI has become a major field of strategic competition," he said, "and big tech got even bigger."
Macron said India's deliberate bet on "small language models," task-specific, smartphone-ready AI tools and its deployment of 38,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) at low cost to startups represented a distinct sovereign strategy, one that challenged the assumption that artificial intelligence is "a game only the biggest can play."
"AI, GPUs, chips are now directly translated into geopolitical and macroeconomic terms," he warned, adding that the concentration of power among large technology firms had grown sharper since France and India co-hosted the AI Action Summit in Paris last year.
Macron called on India, France, and Europe to forge a common path rooted in "human-centric AI" one that safeguards rights, ensures equitable access, and does not sacrifice accountability for speed.
"The future of AI will be built by those who combine innovation and responsibility," he said. "India and France will help shape this future together."
Macron echoed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks from Monday, saying the summit's theme reflected a shared commitment to harnessing AI for "human-centric progress."
Macron praised India's use of technology to ensure citizen good and said that the "future of AI will be for those who combine technology with humanity."
"India and France, with Europe and our partners, those who believe in our approach... might have a different way," he said. "The future of AI will be built by those who combine innovation and responsibility, technology with humanity, and India and France will help shape this future."
The French president argued that the summit's purpose was not simply to accelerate the pace of AI development, but to fundamentally reframe the global conversation — shifting the narrative from "let's do more" to "let's do better together." The distinction, he suggested, was critical for a technology that carries both transformative promise and serious risk.
Macron's speech at the Impact AI summit underscored the deepening of the France-India partnership on artificial intelligence, which has moved beyond diplomacy into concrete collaboration. A newly inaugurated Indo-French Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Health at AIIMS developed in partnership with Sorbonne University and the Paris Brain Institute stood as a symbol of that growing alliance, bridging two of the world's leading medical and research institutions around the promise of AI-driven healthcare.
UNI AAB