How Indo-French partnership can be a rule maker for future innovations – Firstpost

As co-chair of the AI Action Summit in Paris, India, under the prime ministership of Narendra Modi, has the opportunity to kickstart a new chapter in global technological cooperation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a pervasive impact across different sectors. In that sense, it is a general-purpose technology (GPT), to borrow the term from Jeffrey Ding’s GPT Diffusion Theory, which promises to reshape various sectors. Nations are grappling with both its enormous potential and inherent challenges. Now is the time to come together and collaborate on setting a strong foundation for the years to come.

Huge opportunity for India to set the tone

In that context, the summit’s focus on public interest AI, the future of work, innovation, trust, and global governance is commendable. It is also a unique opportunity for India and France to deepen their partnership in a way that shapes the future of AI development.

India should leverage its expertise as a technological powerhouse of the Global South. With its considerable experience in building and running a vast digital public infrastructure (DPI), coupled with a workforce that has proven expertise in software development, India could become an important voice in the global AI discourse.

India has always emphasised democratic access, equitable benefit sharing, interoperable data flows, inclusive development, and ethical deployment—principles that align closely with France’s vision for responsible AI innovation. The aim should be to identify and focus on priority areas for integrating AI with the aim of addressing global challenges. India has raised the issue of cross-border data flows lacking arbitration mechanisms and the importance of aligned views on data sovereignty. This requires institutional mechanisms at the governmental level to lead efforts at establishing these mechanisms and standards.

At various fora, like the 2nd India-France AI Policy Roundtable happening alongside this summit, India has stressed the significance of sovereign AI models and the need to define globally accepted terminologies and standards. Multilingual LLMs, federated AI compute infrastructure, and interoperable access to AI research, datasets, and high-performance computing resources have always been at the forefront of India’s focus. India would do well to stick with these efforts.

Enunciating these principles upfront with a lot more emphasis will do a lot of good for the world at large and also help India bolster its case for global AI leadership.

The global discourse is also veering towards achieving a balance between innovation and safety regulation. The French president said that Europe will cut back on regulation to make it easier for innovation in artificial intelligence and to make the rules more business-friendly, urging investment in the EU, and more specifically in France. This light-touch approach that ensures regulations don’t become too onerous is a good aim to aspire to. This also provides an opportunity for India for collaborative innovation with France in particular and Europe in general.

Meanwhile, France has announced 109 billion euros in private sector AI investments and initiatives like the Current AI partnership, with its focus on public-interest projects. India should join such partnerships to establish collaborative AI hubs.

The India-France partnership in AI holds immense promise. France has advanced research capabilities and regulatory experience. India’s strength lies in large-scale DPI implementation and diverse use-case scenarios. The way forward is to synergise both these strengths to come up with breakthrough innovations in context-sensitive areas such as multilingual AI models, which are crucial for India’s linguistically diverse populations.

For the Global South, this partnership could help bridge the digital divide. The development of AI use cases relevant to developing nations’ unique contexts—from agriculture to healthcare—could help develop new paradigms for inclusive technological development.

However, more than just collaborating on AI research and policy alignment, there are several real use cases that both countries should engage deeply in, which can also help bolster India’s geopolitical standing.

Areas of collaboration

Defence AI collaboration is one area that immediately comes to mind. France, home to cutting-edge defence technology firms like Dassault and Thales, can collaborate with India’s defence research institutions to develop AI-powered surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and predictive cybersecurity solutions. China is increasingly using AI in military applications. This India-France collaboration can significantly counterbalance China’s actions. Additionally, leveraging AI in naval warfare and autonomous submarine technology could enhance maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region.

While AI research is concentrated in the West and China, there is a case to be made for India and France to launch a joint AI Incubation Fund focused on Global South startups. Governments typically do one or more of the following: produce, finance, and regulate functions. While the regulatory function is what is generally focused on, the finance function is equally important because of the positive externalities involved and because of the concept of “diffused benefits, concentrated costs”, which deters the private sector from making the required investments in innovation.

Emerging AI-driven enterprises in sectors like fintech, agritech, and climate resilience would be immensely benefitted by this pooling of resources. This also helps India project its leadership in the Global South while enhancing economic ties with France. Expanding this to include joint AI research centres in key African nations would further deepen their strategic influence.

The next thing to consider would be to merge both countries’ considerable smart city expertise with India’s urbanisation drive. This is a unique opportunity for both nations to co-develop AI-powered solutions for traffic management, water conservation, waste management, renewable energy forecasting, and energy efficiency in Indian cities, leveraging France’s sustainable urban development models and Indian tech firms’ expertise in scalable AI-based software solutions.

To that end, a trilateral India-France-EU AI working group could ensure that AI regulations are pragmatic and innovation-friendly while safeguarding ethical concerns. Such a coalition would also allow India to bridge AI policy differences between the Global South and the West. Engaging other like-minded democracies, such as Japan and Australia, would bolster this initiative further.

Let’s not forget the space sector. Expanding the history of strong space cooperation between France’s CNES and India’s ISRO to AI-driven space applications—such as satellite image analytics for disaster management, AI-powered satellite swarms for real-time climate tracking, environmental monitoring, and AI-based space traffic management—could give India an edge in the rapidly evolving space-tech industry.

AI-powered medical research is another promising area of collaboration. France is a proven leader in biotechnology research, while India possesses expertise in affordable healthcare solutions. Could these be merged to create AI-driven diagnostic tools, robotic surgeries, joint AI projects in drug discovery, and personalised medicine applications?

In the area of sustainability, India and France have already collaborated successfully under the International Solar Alliance (ISA). This needs to be enhanced with AI-driven efficiency models. AI can revolutionise the energy sector, and India and France should co-develop AI-driven predictive analytics for renewable energy management, AI-powered carbon capture technologies, and sustainable mining practices, which could set new global benchmarks in environmental AI applications.

And finally, France and India can collaborate to create AI-powered financial inclusion solutions for underbanked populations. Developing AI models for microfinance, credit risk assessment, and fraud detection could strengthen financial ecosystems in both nations and beyond.

Challenges and the Road Ahead

All of the above collaborations can happen only if governments provide the right nudges. There needs to be institutional mechanisms that take this work forward, further than just summit dialogues. These fora should include industry representatives and representation from society, which includes civil society organisations (because society should be the foundational sector in a Samaaj-Sarkaar-Bazaar framework-based visualisation of the world).

Yes, challenges remain. The need to balance innovation with regulation, ensure data sovereignty while enabling cross-border flows, develop globally accepted standards, and co-create locally relevant AI applications requires careful navigation. Hence, the road ahead requires sustained engagement, resource sharing, and mutual learning.

The author is a research scholar at Takshashila Institution, Bangalore. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.