The La French Tech India AI Summit 2025 event in Bengaluru brought together more than 250 leaders from government, industry, startups, and academia and highlighted another important milestone in the momentum of the strategic partnership between India and France.
The summit, co-organized by La French Tech India with strategic partners, underlines a common pledge to drive a responsible, inclusive, and ethically-grounded development of Artificial Intelligence, especially with a view towards the India-France Year of Innovation 2026.
The day saw participation of over 60 Indian startups and a high-level of engagement was evident from all stakeholders who spoke about the rapidly powering up ecosystem between France and India, two of the world’s most vibrant enterprising nations.
The event started with a video message from Ms. Clara Chappaz, Minister of State for Digital Affairs, France, and saw enlightening insights by Mr. Marc Lamy, Consul General of France to Bengaluru and Mr. Ajay Krishnan, Vice President, Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM). Their remarks struck a collaborative tone, focusing on the urgent importance of an open discussion of how to steer AI to benefit broader social goals.
One of the underlying themes at the summit was that French deep tech skills and its ethical framing of regulations can have a mutual leveraging relationship with India’s huge scale, strong digital public infrastructure and world class talent.
2018 Mr. Sharad Sharma, Co-founder, iSPIRT, made a rousing keynote call to both countries to co-lead the world on an AI model that balances technological progress with domestic and global responsibilities.
Panels were graced with people such as Dr Gaurav Aggarwal of Jio Reliance, Mr Partha Rao of Prints. AI, Mr. Amit Pingle from Michelin Innovation Lab and Mr. Umakant Soni from AI Foundry. They investigated ways that AI at scale can be used to solve real-world problems.
The second half of the summit focused on the ethics of AI, and featured Mr. Hari Subramanian from NitiAI and iSPIRT, who introduced some guiding principles for establishing public trust in emerging technologies, and Ms. Mehak Kasbekar of Brut India, who held a discussion on how media can help shape tech narratives.
Both the countries will deepen cooperation in the field of technology and innovation, the summit resolved. Both countries’ leaders stressed the pressing need for developing practical, people-centred frameworks on AI.
The collaborations and exchanges kicked off at this transformational summit will drive bilateral projects and policy discussions for months to come—ushering in India and France as the principal architects of an AI model that is responsible and scalable for the world.
