Sambhavna, which translates to “possibility” or “opportunity,” is not a term that immediately comes to mind as the theme for a global gathering that brings the often-separated worlds of geopolitics and technology under one roof. Good friends, many from the fragmented “West” and focused on geopolitics, have described this year’s theme for the Global Technology Summit (GTS) as “strange,” “out of sync,” “unreal.” In the dynamic world of technology, “possibilities” is the name of the game.
For those of us at Carnegie India, preoccupied with an outcome-oriented GTS, our sense was that despite the turbulence in global orders and international orientations alike, there is space for Sambhavna. The theocracy of older orders has met with a sledgehammer. Europe’s welfare future is in potential disarray. Trade and tariff wars are the common theme in national and local politics across the world. Get real. Get practical. And embrace realism—that is the tone of the day.
Still, there is a verve in India and beyond—across other parts of Asia, within Latin America, and in large parts of Africa—to seize opportunities for change and shake off older shibboleths that have slowed economic and technological progress. One cannot move without the other.
The point is to discover these opportunities and use the force of global change to initiate long-pending reforms for domestic growth. Build bridges where none exist and find pathways in less-travelled roads. After all, as those in power often remind us, disruptions open the way for alternative opportunities. In many ways, making the best of these opportunities comes down to the tasks of diplomatic skill, assessing trade-offs with a clear-eyed view of our future, and, most importantly, operationally channelling imagination and creativity.
This is the spirit with which we at Carnegie India have approached this year’s GTS. Rather than focusing only on the risks of AI, we focus on its promise. Instead of only debating how and why the “rules of the road” have changed, we focus on how innovations allow for new, scalable approaches to unleash global digital transformation. While debates on space are caught between different stars linking our universe, we look at building technologies for cooperation and how they need to be written into different codes of practice in Geneva, Vienna, and other norm-making jurisdictions.
While climate change enthusiasts remain struck by the exit of the United States, we concentrate on how digital public infrastructure (DPI) for climate change could rescue the Conference of the Parties. As innovative bilateral and plurilateral arrangements in diplomacy shape India’s technology-first advances, we remain fixated on how these mechanisms and their reformations can succeed with the United States—India’s most consequential strategic partner.
We also focus on partnerships with Europe, within the Quad, in emerging economies, and through a range of new alignments with Australia and the United Kingdom. In each of these vectors, we aim to move the policy needle, build bridges, and even get Americans and Europeans to sit together to discuss the future of technology, albeit behind closed doors.
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From geopolitics to grassroots
At an instinctive level, the GTS also serves a mission to sensitise different nationalities, governments, and markets to the variety of ways in which geopolitics shapes technological change between the global and the local. These effects can make or break futures, at least for a specific period of time, and inform the reorientation of national priorities, jettison sovereign alternatives, and potentially break the market.
Take one example.
A senior executive at a large technology firm whispered to me over dinner on the sidelines of the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi: “Only in India do I feel a sense of optimism.” The executive in question had been shown different ways in which open-source technologies are beginning to transform the lives of farmers and teachers across India. Yet, what is often less evident, especially to developers in the Bay Area or in Bengaluru, is that these life-changing technologies are equally hostage to geopolitics. “I simply did not think that the threat of export controls on open-source technologies worried India’s engineers and government officials to this extent,” the executive admitted.
I wrote his comments verbatim later that evening. In doing so, I, too, wondered about our current age, where the life of a farmer in rural India—receiving harvesting information on a feature phone in 20-odd languages, the handiwork of contextualised AI—is unambiguously connected to officials in Washington D.C., weighing export controls.
Will a farmer understand the politically tedious world of export controls when her phone stops messaging? Does the well-meaning official in D.C. fully appreciate how legal actions and executive orders affect a feature phone in Bihar, or Karnataka, or Odisha? The answer in both cases is no. But the two are intricately connected. Promises and opportunities exist alongside the cynicism of geopolitics.
Finding Sambhavna will not be easy in this time of rapidly changing geopolitics. But as the last eight editions of the GTS have proven to us, the possibilities are endless. Government representatives, technocrats, technologists, and experts from over 45 countries will spend three days arguing, debating, and maybe even delicately agreeing on different paths for cooperation and a different pathway for new marketplaces. As diplomats meet engineers and geopolitical gurus exchange cards with technology architects, our hope is that opportunities will be discovered and near-equitable deals will be struck. If I may, and excuse my nationalism, these sharp and honest geo-technical exchanges, at this point in time, are only possible in India. And at the GTS.
The author is the director of Carnegie India. He tweets @Rudra_81. The views expressed in this article are personal. They do not reflect the views of the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, the co-hosts of the Global Technology Summit. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Carnegie India faculty leading the efforts on the GTS.
ThePrint is a Digital Partner of Global Technology Summit 2025 organised by Carnegie India.
(Edited by Prashant)