On 15th January (13:00 - 15:30 UTC) we hosted an official pre-event of the India AI Impact Summit inviting selected presenters to explore:

• How can different forms of participatory AI contribute to inclusion and social empowerment?
• How can the AI Impact Summit advance participatory approaches to AI?

Session report

Over 2.5 hours, 10 panelists and 70 delegates discussed inclusive participatory AI in the context of the India AI Impact Summit. This note provides a synthesis of key themes.

Key Insights

Public participation plays a critical role in AI Impact and needs to be integrated as a necessary component of AI design, deployment and governance. Public participation can address impact in many ways.

• Discover priorities: Inclusive and informed public engagement is needed to understand the impacts that different communities want from AI;
• Co-design and development: Participatory processes are required during the development and evaluation of AI systems to understand how to achieve that impact in inclusive ways; and
• Feedback and accountability: Inclusive participation is required to assess impacts, and to inform the feedback loop between evidence of impacts and policymaker and industry decision making.

Drawing on perspectives from across the Global South (India, Chile, Brazil and Nigeria), and inputs from researchers in the UK, USA, Canada and France, we explored:

• the importance of demonstrating how public participation leads to better AI science;
• the need to create methodologies of participation that “meet people where they are”
• the need for metrics that understand the quality, scope and objective of participatory processes; and
• the value of meaningful inclusion in ‘the last mile’ that engages with bottom-up people-first digital development projects rather than top-down ‘AI-first’ interventions.

Sustainable adoption of AI, including informed choices and the right to reject certain uses, depends on public trust.  But trust cannot exist without participation. Inclusive participation requires understanding how AI, as well as unequal access to AI, affects different groups in different ways. Quantitative public-attitudes research often obscures critical nuance, masking how specific communities are differently impacted by, and feel about, particular AI applications. Meaningful understanding of AI impact therefore requires an ecology of participatory methods, not a single approach.

Public engagement on AI cannot be online-only. Addressing structural inequalities demands sustained, well-resourced outreach to offline communities, people with low digital literacy, speakers of Indigenous languages, and those who rely on intermediaries to participate. Without this, engagement risks reproducing the very exclusions it seeks to address.

Effective public participation helps establish a social contract around technology: shared expectations and obligations between governments, industry, and society to ensure innovation serves the public good. Participatory processes can also lend continuity and legitimacy to AI strategies, helping to stabilize them across political cycles and changes in administration.

Recommendations

Through group deliberation we identified the following four recommendations for the AI Impact Summit:

• Require transparent and auditable evidence of meaningful public participation in securing AI impact
  • Governments and firms should be able to demonstrate how they have engaged communities in
    • Defining desired social and economic impacts of AI
    • Design choices to achieve those impacts
    • Evaluation of intended and unintended consequences
• Ensure “internationalism” of participation
  • Firms should be required to engage affected publics in all markets where their AI systems are deployed, not only in their home countries. Regulatory and governance frameworks should reflect the transnational nature of AI impacts.
• Elevate funding for public engagement programmes
  • Governments, funders, and firms should scale up funding for sustained public engagement programmes, including national deliberative processes and community-led, bottom-up participation mechanisms that support people in understanding and responding to AI impacts. Ring fence AI funding within R&D budgets.
• Institutionalise public and civil society representation in AI governance forums.
  • Future summits and high-level AI convenings should formally embed social scientists, civil society organisations, and directly representative citizen voices. These forums should be used as structured moments to take stock of public attitudes, lived experiences, and priorities for the future impacts of AI.

Final agenda

• 13:00 UTC: Welcome & introductions
  • Introducing the India AI Impact Summit - Jhalak Kakkar (Centre for Communication Governance at NLU Delhi)
  • Introducing PAIRS 2026 - Astha Kapoor (Aapti Institute) and Tim Davies (Connected by Data)
• 13:20 UTC: Perspectives on Participation with:
  • J. Nathan Matias (Cornell University) and Megan Price (Human Rights Data Analysis Group): How Public Involvement Can Improve the Science of Artificial Intelligence
  • Ameen Jauhar (CABI): Participation as Promise: Reframing Responsible AI in Agricultural Development
  • Dr. Arpita Kanjilal (Digital Empowerment Foundation): Co-Designing Trustworthy AI for The Last Mile: A Community-Centred Developmental Framework from the Global South
• 14:10 UTC: Participation for who? Interrogating inclusion with:
  • Octavia Field Reid (Ada Lovelace Institute): Attitudinal research on AI: challenges and innovations for representation
  • Jose A. Guridi (Cornell University) and Sacha Alanoca (Stanford University): Participatory AI Governance: Lessons from Brazil and Chile
  • Faidat Abdullahi (Africa Digital Inclusion Alliance): Participation Without Inclusion? Rethinking Participatory AI Governance under Digital Inequity.
• 15:00 UTC: Shaping recommendations
  • Breakout sessions to refine recommendations for the AI Impact Summit.
• 15:30 UTC: Close

AI Impact Summit Pre-Event

This PAIRS Preview session is an official pre-summit event for the India AI Impact Summit. A report from the event will be submitted to inform summit dialogues.

Supporters

Funding support for PAIRS 2026 is provided by AI Collaborative. The 2026 Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium is coordinated by a programme committee including members from University of Washington, Georgetown University, ITS Rio, Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi, Sciences Po, Centre for Internet and Society, CNRS, London School of Economics, University of Sheffield and the following civil society organisations: