India AI Impact Summit 2026: Togo, Indonesia & Egypt Push Life

Ministers from Togo, Indonesia and Egypt on Thursday told a high-level panel at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 that artificial intelligence must move beyond infrastructure to deliver measurable societal impact, with success defined by the number of lives improved rather than the scale of models or computing power.

The discussion focused on closing adoption gaps in the Global South, prioritising public-interest applications, striking regulatory balance and establishing clear metrics for AI progress over the next five years.

Nezar Patria, Vice Minister of Communications and Digital Affairs of Indonesia, rated current global AI impact at six out of ten and stressed that access must be meaningful rather than merely infrastructural. He highlighted Indonesia’s expansion of internet penetration to around 80 per cent of the population across its archipelago and cited the deployment of AI-driven diagnostic tools to help doctors in remote areas detect tuberculosis. Patria called for balanced regulation that safeguards citizens without stifling innovation, greater investment in research and development, stronger digital talent pools, and AI systems that are transparent, accountable and trustworthy. He said AI must be accessible, problem-solving in focus and trusted by society.

Cina Lawson, Minister of Public Sector Efficiency and Digital Transformation of Togo, emphasised that for Africa AI is about solving real-life challenges in health, education, agriculture and public administration rather than technology for its own sake. She noted that Africa accounts for less than one per cent of global AI talent and faces persistent infrastructure and connectivity gaps. Drawing on Togo’s pandemic experience, Lawson described how AI algorithms applied to satellite imagery and telecom metadata helped prioritise financial aid beneficiaries for targeted, efficient support. She said Togo has since created an in-house data science team within the ministry to drive evidence-based policymaking across government. Lawson identified infrastructure shortfalls, limited institutional capacity and the lack of local language AI models as major barriers to scaling impact. Looking five years ahead, she envisioned AI enabling every citizen to access public services seamlessly, potentially through conversational interfaces in local languages, supported by trusted and inclusive systems.

Raafat Hindy, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt, said AI success should be judged by the percentage of citizens benefiting from high-quality AI-enabled services, especially in healthcare, education and government. He described Egypt’s efforts to use AI to broaden access to medical screening and learning support for underserved communities, ensuring benefits extend beyond elite institutions and major cities. Hindy framed AI as a development tool rather than a dominance tool, calling for shared compute resources, prioritisation of public services and robust national AI institutions. He stressed the need to address gaps in infrastructure, compute capacity and local language models to achieve equitable adoption.

Moderating the panel, Debjani Ghosh observed that governments are increasingly aligned on artificial intelligence. “Its success, again, is not about the size of your infrastructure, but about how many lives are changed,” she said. “In order to scale transformation of lives, you need to ensure your technology is trustworthy. You need to ensure it’s inclusive by design. You need to invest in capacity development and innovation. And it’s fantastic to see everyone thinking along the same lines, because it really brings forth the importance of collective action and collaboration, and I think that’s what has come out of the summit.”

The panel concluded that true AI progress should be measured not by the size of models or computing infrastructure but by the number of lives transformed. Participants underscored inclusive design, trust, institutional capacity building, innovation-friendly regulation and global collaboration as essential to ensure AI serves humanity equitably and responsibly.