Ambani and Mittal at the Global AI Table: India's Private Sector Shapes the Norms

When Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, Salesforce Chair Marc Benioff, and ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin launched the AI for Good Global Commission on Thursday, the list of founding members read like a directory of the global technology order: Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Microsoft's Brad Smith, Amazon's Andy Jassy, Google's James Manyika, Qualcomm's Cristiano Amon. And then: Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries and Sunil Bharti Mittal of Bharti Enterprises.

That pairing deserves attention. Ambani and Mittal are not primarily technology companies in the Silicon Valley sense — they are infrastructure operators at scale. Jio's subscriber base spans hundreds of millions of Indians. Airtel runs networks across eighteen markets in Africa and Asia. If the commission's stated priority is to address the fact that roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide still lack internet access, then the two men who have extended digital connectivity into underserved populations are precisely the right voices to have in the room.

What the Commission Is Actually Trying to Do

The ITU describes the commission's mandate as reducing the gap among governments, industry, and international institutions as economies worldwide adopt AI while managing questions of safety, governance, and equitable access. It aims to bring together technology developers, policymakers, industry leaders, and community representatives to promote responsible AI deployment across sectors and borders — with a specific commitment that developing countries shape AI's future.

That last clause matters most for understanding why Ambani and Mittal's membership carries weight. Global AI governance conversations have been dominated by a tight cluster of American and European actors — large-model developers, regulatory bodies in Brussels and Washington, and multilateral institutions whose secretariats remain weighted toward the North Atlantic. The AI for Good commission, anchored partly through the ITU and co-launched by an African head of state, represents an attempt to widen that circle. Indian private-sector members arrive as founding architects of the framework itself.

The Governance Gap India Now Has a Chance to Fill

India's national AI posture has been shaped through two instruments: the IndiaAI Mission, launched in 2024 with significant government outlay, and the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration from India's G20 presidency, which produced consensus language on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. Both are real achievements. Neither translates into the durable norm-setting influence that comes from sustained presence inside the bodies that write technical and governance standards.

Commission membership offers precisely that — and precisely where a coordination challenge lies. Ambani and Mittal are founding members in their individual corporate capacities, not as official representatives of Indian state policy. The Ministry of Electronics and IT, the IndiaAI Mission secretariat, and the Ministry of External Affairs each have their own AI priorities. Without a formal mechanism to align these with what Indian private-sector members argue inside the commission, the risk is that India occupies a seat but speaks with several voices, none authoritative.

Analysts working on India's technology diplomacy have noted this structural gap. India's G20 AI legacy was a genuine diplomatic achievement, but converting it into durable multilateral influence requires sustained private-sector engagement in exactly the kind of bodies the commission represents. The commission gives India a vehicle. Whether that vehicle carries a coherent payload depends on decisions made in New Delhi as much as in Geneva.

Agenda Items India Should Put on the Table

The commission's founding framework — trust, access, equitable development — maps onto the priorities Indian industry and government have articulated in international forums. Three are specific enough to be actionable.

The first is multilingual AI. India's linguistic diversity is not a complication for AI deployment; it is a design requirement. Any global governance framework that treats English-language AI as the default will systematically disadvantage billions of users across South and Southeast Asia. Indian commission members are positioned to make this a structural priority.

The second is low-cost inference infrastructure. The AI economy's current trajectory concentrates compute capacity in a handful of hyperscale data centres in a handful of countries. For developing economies, where models run — and at what cost — is inseparable from whether AI access is genuinely equitable. India's experience building large-scale, cost-efficient digital infrastructure offers a model worth embedding in the commission's recommendations.

The third is data sovereignty compatibility. As AI governance frameworks mature, they will increasingly link market access to regulatory alignment — the pattern visible in the EU's AI Act. India's own data protection architecture remains a work in progress, which is precisely why Indian representatives need to be inside the rooms where global standards are written, shaping them toward compatibility with domestic frameworks.

The Honest Risk

Commission membership carries complications. Bodies of this kind generate recommendations with normative weight even without formal treaty authority. If the commission's outputs embed governance principles that prioritise Western-style liability frameworks, centralised model registries, or audit requirements calibrated to large-model developers in rich countries, the downstream effect on India's domestic AI regulation could be real.

Sunil Bharti Mittal has argued at ITU forums that AI governance must not replicate the digital divide, pushing for open-access AI infrastructure for emerging markets. That is the right frame. The risk is that a commission weighted toward American technology companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Qualcomm, Anthropic, Accenture all have founding members — will produce recommendations that reflect the interests of large-model developers with entrenched compute advantages. Indian members will need to be more than present; they will need to be insistent.

Vodafone's Margherita Della Valle and Cohere's Aidan Gomez round out a membership list that spans operators, developers, and platform companies. The diversity of the roster is real. So is the gravitational pull of its centre of mass.

From Seat to Substance

India has demonstrated across two decades of digital infrastructure build-out that scale and affordability are not mutually exclusive — that connectivity can be extended to the margins of an economy without waiting for the centre to reach saturation. That is exactly the argument the AI for Good commission needs to hear, consistently and in specific policy terms, not as aspiration but as a deployable model.

The structural tension is clear: India's private sector is now present in global AI governance ahead of domestic regulatory consolidation. That sequencing is not ideal, but India has navigated similar gaps in other technology domains. The more productive question is whether MeitY, the IndiaAI Mission, and the Ministry of External Affairs can use the commission's formation as pressure to accelerate internal alignment. Ambani and Mittal are at the table. What India says through them depends on whether anyone in New Delhi is coordinating the message.