IFPRI is pleased to participate in the India‑AI Impact Summit 2026, held from February 16–20, 2026, in New Delhi, India, as well as in the PAIRS 2026 Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium, a satellite event on February 18 focused on participatory approaches to AI research and practice. The PAIRS symposium brings together researchers and practitioners to explore participatory development, governance, and critical questions about inclusion in the future of AI.

The India–AI Impact Summit 2026, announced by Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the France AI Action Summit, will be the first-ever global AI summit hosted in the Global South. Building on leading international forums such as the UK AI Safety Summit, the AI Seoul Summit, the France AI Action Summit, and the Global AI Summit on Africa, this high-level convening marks a critical inflection point in global AI cooperation—strengthening multilateral initiatives, advancing new priorities, and delivering demonstrable impact in AI governance and innovation. For more information, please click HERE.

India‑AI Impact Summit 2026 | Session: From Vision to Action: Scaling Equitable AI Advisory Systems Through AGX AI | February 16, 2026 | 9:30am (Asia/Kolkata) | L1 Meeting Room No. 8

This interactive session convenes leaders advancing AI advisory systems in agriculture to explore AGX AI as a growing community of practice focused on responsibly scaling AI for small-scale producers. Drawing on work in benchmarking, data corpus development, and model approaches, the session highlights emerging learning priorities, key collaboration needs, and opportunities for participants to help shape the next phase of shared learning across regions and sectors.

• This session draws on the work of the AGX community, of which IFPRI researchers Jawoo Koo, Eliot Jones-Garcia, and Tushar Singh are convenors and contributors.

PAIRS: Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium 2026 | Parallel Sessions (I5): Participation as Promise: Reframing Responsible AI in Agricultural Development | February 18, 2026 | 11:00am (Asia/Kolkata)

Participatory and human-centered approaches have become central to the discourse on responsible AI, premised on the idea that involving end-users will better align technological outputs with local needs and contexts. Yet in the agriculture and development (AgDev) sector, there is a widening disconnect between the limited benefits accruing to farmers and the rhetoric used by corporate and development actors to justify broader investment in AI. The language of inclusion and empowerment is often coopted to legitimise the rapid scaling of systems promoted as solutions to climate stress, food insecurity, and smallholder vulnerability. In practice, however, participation often remains tokenistic—amounting to a form of “participation washing.” Farmers’ fields are repurposed as experimental sites for collecting training data and stress-testing new technologies, while narratives of “digital divides” dominate design agendas, perpetuating a deficit model that overlooks existing local practices and capacities. Rather than shifting power or epistemic authority, such initiatives reproduce extractive dynamics, instrumentalising participation in service of commercial ends.

IFPRI Speaker: Eliot Jones-Garcia, Senior Research Analyst, IFPRI