As the curtains draw on the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, a curious divergence between the two hemispheres on how they view artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming clearer.
While large parts of the West wrestle with a tech winter of scepticism, the Global South, including India and China, seems to be experiencing a digital spring.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself noted in his summit address that “while some see fear in AI, India sees its future in it”.
When the AI Summit began in Bletchley Park, UK, in 2023, it was named the AI Safety Summit. Moving eastwards, it has now become the Impact Summit.
This is substantiated by data. A recent EY survey, which looked at how populations viewed the most consequential technology of our times via an AI Sentiment Index, has revealed that India and China sit at the top, both 88% positive, with UAE at 87% and Saudi Arabia at 86% close behind. UK at 54%, France at 51% and US at 58% are noticeably cooler.
The report exposes a persistent “sentiment divide”, with people in India and this side of the world expecting AI’s impact to be positive, while places like US, UK, and the West more broadly, sweating over privacy and security risks.
The Ipsos AI Monitor says something similar. So does a study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne, placing Australia right at the bottom on AI optimism and India right at the top.Why does AI optimism tilt East, while scepticism bends West?
It’s the economy, silly
One big reason is simple and brutal: perceived downside risk.
In many high-income western economies, large, stable, white-collar job classes have more to lose from automation and wage pressure. In the Snakes and Ladders game of life, AI is a snake, threatening to disrupt an orderly, process-driven life.
In developing economies, the mental model is often inverted: AI is a ladder —it reads less like an intrusion and more like an opportunity to step up from where you are.
For the masses, there is nothing to lose except some privacy, and they look at AI as an opportunity to be grabbed to pole-vault their way up in life— much like education, English and computers earlier.
For a professional in London, AI might “disrupt” a job; for a farmer in rural India or an entrepreneur in Nairobi, AI-driven diagnostics or agritech is a first-time bridge to services that never existed before.
Demography amplifies that. A younger population is generally more comfortable experimenting with tools and retooling careers, and the Global South is teeming with young people, looking at new opportunities to make it in life. Unlike the West, where 54% Americans reject the growing use of AI, nearly 70% Indians embrace it as an empowering hero in their professional lives.
There is also lived experience with tech that actually works. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure stack with UPI and Aadhaar, 10-minute deliveries and frictionless subsidies have made the digital state tangible and transformational for ordinary citizens.
When you have experienced friction collapse, you overwhelmingly feel that technology can be a net public good. And at the AI Impact Summit, the “DPI meets AI” framing is explicitly being positioned as a Global South template of scaling inclusion and public good first.
Cultural divergence
Privacy and ethics mean different things here. There is a cultural divergence in how we value data and surveillance. In the West, privacy is often treated as an absolute individual right, sometimes at the cost of innovation.
In the East, a more communal and pragmatic outlook prevails. If sharing data leads to better healthcare or more efficient governance, the majority are happy to make that trade-off.
Often, the immediate, visible benefits can outweigh abstract future harms, especially when the future is not too bright anyway. Western societies, having already built much of the infrastructure, allocate more attention to second-order effects: surveillance creep, algorithmic discrimination, deepfake misinformation and corporate capture.
As Dan Wang’s Breakneck postulates: the West shows up with its lawyers, its regulators, its trust deficits and its culture-war tripwires. The East arrives with builders, late adopters hungry to leapfrog and populations that still believe the next tool might expand their horizons.
Put all the above together and you get the atmosphere at the summit in New Delhi: the world shows up to talk about AI, and India’s public mood is unusually bullish, with crowds thronging the venue.
Middle Path
As someone who divides time between the East and the West, for me, it is obvious that optimism is a competitive advantage—it speeds adoption, rewards experimentation and attracts investment.
Having said that, it is not all a bed of roses. Misplaced optimism without trust can be dangerous. If India and the broader East want to win, they will need a middle path: enthusiastic and serious, with fast lanes for innovation, but hard rails for safety, and visible regulation and accountability when AI harms real people. With this balance, the Optimistic East can lead the AI century.
The history of technology is rarely written by the fearful. It is written by those who see opportunity where others see risk. The West is currently building fences; the East is building rainbows, because the AI sun rises in the East.
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