India hosting the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi has led to significant  global attention. As the first Global South country to host the Summit — following editions in the UK, France, and South Korea — India’s leadership marks a pivotal time in conversations around AI governance as the world recognises the growing importance of inclusive perspectives in global AI debates.

At a time when development and governance of emergent technologies largely remains confined to, and dominated by developed economies, this moment presents a critical opportunity to foreground priorities, concerns, and aspirations from the Global South — particularly where questions of development, equity, and democratic participation intersect with AI deployment.

To ensure inclusivity and representation, it is also imperative that actors beyond the State participate in such discussion. Therefore, the role of civil society and academics becomes increasingly important in a world as diverse as ours — to ensure that communities, especially those vulnerable, are empowered by these technologies and their risks are neither overlooked nor underestimated. While over the course of three previous Summits, conversations on AI governance have steadily broadened its participation, the challenge remains  persistent.

It is in this context, to surface Global South representation and multistakeholder perspectives into Summit-related discourse, the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi (CCG-NLUD) and the Global Network Initiative (GNI) have convened a series of pre-Summit multistakeholder dialogues under the Multistakeholder Approaches to Participation in AI Governance (MAP-AI) initiative. Held across four continents over the past eight months, these convenings brought together stakeholders from government, civil society, academia, multilateral organisations, foundations, and industry — see, for instance, here, here and here.

From these dialogues, the  central insight that has emerged is this: the most immediate impacts of AI are unfolding in multilingual, culturally diverse, resource-constrained, and high-inequality contexts. And so, if governance frameworks continue to be shaped primarily by Global North priorities or abstract risk models, this will only go on to risk overlooking these lived realities.

Therefore, we are happy to put forth the learnings from these events into a  curated Insights Document that consolidates evidence-based insights emerging from the pre-Summit dialogues. This document brings together insights across seven principles including five key themes from the Summit — Safe and Trusted AI, Democratising AI Resources, AI for Economic Growth and Social Good, Human Capital; and Inclusion for Social Empowerment — as well as two cross-cutting areas: Multistakeholderism, and Global South Leadership and Resources.

These insights will feed into our flagship convening on 17 February and contribute to ongoing discussions at the India AI Impact Summit and beyond.