ISB Governance Summit 2026

AI is rapidly transforming digital payments and commerce, from real-time fraud detection and risk scoring to agentic commerce and tokenised ecosystems. This session explored how intelligent systems are redefining trust, security, and customer experience, while enabling broader participation in digital economies, particularly for women, marginalised sections of society, small businesses, and first-time digital users. India's digital payments landscape has achieved remarkable scale through UPI and allied infrastructure. The next frontier lies in ensuring that the intelligence layered on top of this infrastructure is equitable, accountable, and genuinely inclusive. From AI-driven credit scoring to agentic transaction models, the session examined the governance and design choices that determine who benefits from these advances and who remains excluded.

With over 900 million internet users in India, nearly half of them women, online safety is a critical priority, particularly for women and children who face disproportionate risks. While AI is reshaping digital ecosystems, it is also amplifying harassment, bullying, gender-based violence, deepfakes, and misinformation. This session focused on the implementation realities of online safety systems, what is working, where gaps remain, and how social media platforms, government, and civil society can respond more effectively. A key challenge is that safety systems remain largely reactive and reporting-led, placing the burden on users, especially women and children, to flag harm. This is compounded by gaps in data consistency across systems, including differences between social media platform transparency reports and NCRB cybercrime data, making it difficult to understand the full scale of harm. At the same time, India has important foundational frameworks such as the IT Rules, 2021, the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, and evolving safety guidelines for social media, which provide a base for strengthening accountability and grievance systems. The session explored how these frameworks and systems can evolve toward proactive identification, prevention, and safety-by-design, while also addressing real-world usage patterns such as shared devices, family accounts, and varying digital literacy, especially for women and children. It also examined how accountability can be made more practical, enforceable, and responsive to gendered risks, while ensuring access, agency, and protection are balanced.

As India continues its journey towards strengthening equitable healthcare delivery, Artificial Intelligence is emerging as a powerful enabler of accessible, affordable, and accurate healthcare services. This panel discussion on "Transforming India's Healthcare: Leveraging AI for Access, Affordability, and Accuracy" brought together policymakers, healthcare leaders, practitioners, and innovators to explore how AI-driven solutions are reshaping the healthcare ecosystem. The session focused on the role of AI in expanding healthcare access to underserved regions, improving diagnostic accuracy, reducing costs through digital innovation, and supporting scalable healthcare interventions across both public and private systems.

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping India's workforce, businesses, and entrepreneurial ecosystem. While AI may automate routine and repetitive jobs, it also has the potential to create new industries, improve productivity, support MSMEs, and generate new livelihood opportunities. For India, the real question is not whether AI will change the future of work, but how the country can prepare its workforce, institutions, and businesses to benefit from this transition. This session explored how AI can drive inclusive growth, support startups and MSMEs, create new digital business models, and expand opportunities for youth and women. AI is expected to reduce demand in repetitive roles such as data entry, basic customer support, and routine administrative work. However, it is also likely to increase demand in areas such as AI, data science, cybersecurity, digital skilling, healthcare, logistics, e-commerce, agritech, and creative industries. New roles such as prompt engineers, AI ethics specialists, algorithm auditors, and digital trust professionals are also emerging. At the same time, AI can democratise entrepreneurship by enabling small businesses to access tools for marketing, customer engagement, logistics, design, and operations without large teams or high costs. The session also briefly examined how AI-related layoffs and workforce disruptions can be managed through reskilling, transition support, and responsible adoption of technology.

As India advances towards a digitally empowered governance ecosystem, the role of Artificial Intelligence in strengthening last-mile public service delivery has become increasingly significant. This session on "Operationalising AI for Last Mile Governance: Delivering Impact from State to Gram Panchayat" brought together policymakers, practitioners, and innovators to explore how AI can move beyond pilot projects and translate into measurable impact on the ground. Focusing on sectors such as health, education, climate resilience, and disaster risk reduction, the discussion examined scalable and inclusive approaches to deploying AI across governance systems while addressing challenges related to implementation, institutional capacity, and equitable access.