TechTicker Edition 74: January 2026

Title: Building AI for All – Road to the IndiaAI Impact Summit

We know you were waiting for us in your inbox last week, but January was not an ordinary month for us at Ikigai Law.

This edition is a little different and intentionally so. Instead of our usual tech policy roundup of what happened in the month of Jan, we’re taking a deliberate detour in the run up to the IndiaAI Impact Summit due to take place this month.

We’ve been in rooms with engineers, regulators, builders, policy professionals, lawyers, leaders, and even skeptics. At a moment when choices about AI design, deployment, training, and governance feel especially consequential in India, we convened conversations around agentic systems, asked hard questions on what inclusion in AI really means, published practical guidance for AI developers, and resisted the comfort of staying abstract in our approach.  

January was less about reacting to policy and more about shaping it, testing, and translating our ideas into practice.

Source: Created by Nirmal

As we kick off this (proud) round-up, a small heads-up: Ikigai Law will be very much present at the IndiaAI Impact Summit from February 16-20. So, if the Summit makes a few repeat appearances in this edition, that’s not an accident.

Taking stock of India’s AI readiness

Over the past year, Ikigai Law has worked together with UNESCO and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), to prepare India’s AI Readiness Assessment (RAM) Report.

Stakeholder consultations were held across multiple cities and inputs from more than 650 participants were collected. This nationwide effort is among the most extensive RAM exercises across the world.

We are excited to share that the India AI RAM is now ready for public release, at the Summit on February 16. This report offers a comprehensive overview of the country’s AI landscape across five dimensions — legal, social, scientific, economic, and technical. It maps key initiatives, assesses national preparedness, and sets out actionable recommendations to improve the ecosystem.

AI4ALL: Making inclusion in AI a default choice

We hosted the third roundtable in a series of roundtables for the AI4ALL initiative in Mumbai, in collaboration with Meta.

As AI systems scale, inclusion stops being a principle and becomes an implementation challenge. The AI4ALL Initiative examines how artificial intelligence can bridge social and digital divides by advancing accessibility, linguistic inclusion, digital literacy, and economic opportunity. Through three pre-summit roundtables in Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, the initiative seeks to generate practical, actionable insights on how policy, innovation, and implementation can enable inclusive AI solutions in India.

In Mumbai, the conversation cut across sectors and use cases, but kept returning to a shared insight: inclusion cannot be bolted on later. It has to be embedded into system design — from the moment an idea is conceived, through deployment, and well into how systems are governed over time.

We’ll be launching the AI4ALL Report at the IndiaAI Impact Summit — keep an eye out !

Creating inclusive AI for healthcare – Project BUILD

January also marked the conclusion of Project BUILD — Building Inclusivity by Design in AI/ML-Powered Healthtech, a two-year research collaboration led by Ikigai Law, in partnership with NALSAR University of Law and the University of Melbourne.

Project BUILD set out to develop concrete policy recommendations and partnership pathways to support the deployment of inclusive AI in healthcare, with a particular focus on India–Australia collaboration. It was funded through a grant from the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under the Australia–India Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership.

At the launch, we released two reports emerging from the project’s research and consultations:

 - Building Inclusivity by Design – Governance, Processes and Partnerships: A Memorandum for National, Regional and Inter-Governmental Officials

  - Co-Designing Inclusive AI in Healthcare: A Toolkit for Developers and Deployers

The project reinforced a familiar insight: when AI systems move into sensitive, high-impact domains like healthcare, questions of inclusion, governance, and institutional design become just as important as technical performance.

We will explore the findings from this report at the IndiaAI Impact Summit too!

Enterprise AI and adoption for scale and impact

Together with Business Software Alliance (BSA), we are organising a main Summit event and panel discussion titled "Enabling Global Enterprise AI Adoption for Impact.”

The forum will bring together leaders from government, industry, and civil society to examine how enterprises can adopt AI responsibly and at scale. It will spotlight real-world enterprise AI use cases and introduce BSA’s Global Enterprise AI Adoption Agenda — a set of actionable recommendations aligned with the IndiaAI Impact Summit’s pillars of People, Planet, and Progress.

Reimagining gender in technology

As AI systems increasingly mediate speech, work, and access to services, issues of inclusion, gender, and impact on marginalised communities are still too often treated as afterthoughts.

Together with the UNFPA and University of Melbourne, we are co-hosting an event “Reimagining Gender in Technology: Designing Safer Digital Futures and Advancing Ethical AI for Inclusive Platforms” on 16 February. This will be a panel discussion on how AI systems and digital platforms can be designed and governed to be safer, more inclusive, and more responsive to the lived realities of women and marginalised communities.

When Agentic AI becomes inclusive

Agentic AI systems sound elegant and fun on paper. But they behave differently when deployed. In a pre-summit event we organized on Agentic AI systems in Delhi — the AI for Inclusion Symposium — in collaboration with IIIT Bangalore, Microsoft, and A4I, we confronted this gap.

We had an exceptional line-up of keynote speakers, including Anandrao Vishnu Patil and Hari Kumar Janakiraman from the Ministry of Education, alongside Shekar Sivasubramanian, Head of Wadhwani AI.

The symposium brought together policymakers, researchers, engineers, and deployers to examine what happens when agentic AI systems move from labs into real-world use. This wasn’t just a theoretical conversation about AI. Engineers and deployers from the A4I lab ran live demos of agentic systems and answered technical questions in real time — grounding policy and governance discussions in how these systems actually behave when deployed.

A new handbook for AI developers – turning privacy into design decisions

We launched and published the Handbook on Data Protection and Privacy for Developers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India, a joint initiative by Ikigai Law, GIZ, DSCI, and NASSCOM.

Designed as a practical, developer-facing resource, the handbook goes beyond simply restating the law. Instead, it walks AI developers and product teams through how India’s data protection and privacy requirements surface in real design, training, deployment, and lifecycle decisions. The focus is on helping teams build responsibly without treating compliance as an afterthought — or an innovation killer.

For a space where legal obligations often feel abstract or intimidating, the handbook aims to translate law into design and engineering choices developers can actually work with.

We see this handbook as a foundation for continued engagement with developers, regulators, and ecosystem partners to ensure that compliance, innovation, and responsible AI grow together

You can read more about it here. 

ITechLaw India Conference

The recently held ITechLaw India Conference brough together practitioners and policymakers from across jurisdictions to exchange perspectives on technology law, AI governance, and digital regulation. The conference was also part of the pre-summit event in the lead up to the IndiaAI Impact Summit.

Ikigai Law was one of the conference sponsors this year, marking our continued engagement with global technology law conversations. Our Partner Nehaa Chaudhari served as a Co-Chair, steering discussions that brought together Indian and international perspectives on all things tech.

Adding to the mix, our Partner Sreenidhi Srinivasan was a moderator in a session that reflected how India’s regulatory experience is increasingly shaping global privacy debates. Our colleagues Astha Srivastava and Akshat Tenneti were also in attendance.

A practical DPDP workshop in Namma Bengaluru

On January 27, we hosted our second DPDP Workshop with an incredible group of In-house legal counsels from across sectors who brought their A-game to an insightful discussion on India’s evolving privacy and data protection landscape.

Together, we worked through case studies, real-world scenarios and deep-dived into key industry approaches and nuances around consent mechanisms, classification of Significant Data Fiduciaries, appointment of Data Protection Officers, contract structuring and, negotiation tactics.

Designed as a collaborative session rather than a lecture, the workshop encouraged fresh perspectives and practical takeaways — helping attendees grapple with the compliance questions they are already facing on the ground.

An active YouTube channel (and a moving LinkedIn feed)

If you’ve noticed a steady stream of short-form videos popping up on our LinkedIn feed — or wondered why our YouTube channel suddenly looks alive – we're trying something new.

These videos are part of Truth, Trust & Technology, a policy dialogue on online speech regulation organised by Ikigai Law and the National Law School of India University, held in Bengaluru on November 7, 2025. The dialogue brought together legal scholars, practitioners, technologists, journalists, and policymakers to grapple with a difficult but urgent question: how can democracies respond to misinformation in the current digital era?

EMBED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bciNASq7KJE

We have a lot more planned for this year, so go subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on LinkedIn!

Reading reccos  

Since this edition is already doing things a little differently, we’re keeping it simple at the end. No deep dives or courtroom updates — just a longer list of reading recommendations that’s been on our minds:

•  Bharat Reddy offers a sharp breakdown of the Union Budget from an AI lens, unpacking what it actually means for India’s AI ecosystem beyond the headline allocations.
• Storyboard 18 looks at how the Budget could support India’s growing “orange economy,” and where policy attention could better align with creative and cultural industries.
• Rest of World has a sobering but important report on India’s IT services sector — and the precarious realities faced by many of its workers.
• Also, on Rest of World  - a thoughtful perspective on why some countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. tech companies.
• Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson shares his views and reflects on the costs of AI-generated art — not just economically, but creatively — and what that could mean for artists and storytelling.
• Dave Friedman in his newsletter backs Apple’s AI strategy, which is often seen lagging behind other AI companies.
• On Activate Signal, you will find an interesting survey of over 200 AI builders in India on their actual workflows, and what AI tools they really use. 

January was fast-paced, but it also gave us more than a few moments that made us proud as a team. It also offered a reminder of how good policy work happens – not in isolation or neat silos, but through conversations that cut across domains, disciplines and expertise.

None of this work — the events, the consultations, the reports, the conversations — happens on autopilot. It takes planning, ideation, research, last-minute pivots, and a lot of quiet effort that never quite makes it into the spotlight.

As we head into the IndiaAI Impact Summit, it felt right to pause, acknowledge the month that was, and give the team a well-earned pat on the back.

Normal Ticker programming resumes soon. But this January deserved its own footnote.

Signing off!

Ayush Nehaa Nirmal Vijayant