Adobe’s Narayen, FedEx’s Subramaniam lead largest-ever American business delegation to India AI Summit as $67.5B infrastructure bet hinges on workforce readiness
NEW DELHI, February 19, 2026 – A delegation of 120 U.S. CEOs, including Adobe Chair Shantanu Narayen, FedEx President Raj Subramaniam, Microsoft President Brad Smith, and General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja, arrived in New Delhi today for the India AI Impact Summit as American tech giants prepare to deploy $67.5 billion in AI and data center infrastructure across India over the next five years.
The investment—led by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google according to The New York Times—positions India as a strategic AI hub. But there’s a catch: 74% of Indian CEOs say workforce readiness will determine whether their companies grow over the next three years, per KPMG’s India CEO Outlook 2025. The infrastructure is coming. The talent isn’t ready.
The five-day summit, organized by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has drawn 35,000 participants and 50+ ministers from across the world. The U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) is leading the American contingent, the largest U.S. business presence at an AI-focused event in India.
AI native platform CambrianEdge.ai is serving as Knowledge Partner to USISPF at the summit. Harjiv Singh, founder and CEO of CambrianEdge.ai, moderated a panel examining how Indian enterprises can operationalize AI literacy across workforces at scale, bringing together Girish Raghavan, CTO of GE Healthcare; Vijay Guntur, CTO of HCL Tech; Kumaresh Pattabiraman, India Country Manager and Vice President-Product at LinkedIn; and Rohit Kumar Singh, Former Secretary to the Government of India and Chair of the Global Value Chains Committee and Advisor to the USISPF Board.
The panel explored the gap between AI literacy – the ability to use tools like ChatGPT – and AI fluency, which requires the judgment to know when to trust or override AI outputs. Pattabiraman noted that India leads both AI supply (growing 12% year-on-year) and demand (surging 51%), while 60% of workers who need reskilling don’t yet know they’re in that cohort. Guntur shared that HCL Tech is targeting to double revenue with half the workforce while creating 4,000 new roles that didn’t exist 18 months ago, emphasizing that enablement and visibility into new opportunities are key to maintaining morale during transformation.
Raghavan highlighted that GE Healthcare holds the largest number of FDA AI approvals and stressed that democratizing diagnostics means enabling non-specialists to deliver specialist-equivalent outcomes – while accountability remains with humans.
“India has the talent and ambition, but our edge will come from how fast we build execution capability across the workforce,” Harjiv Singh said. “Marketing alone employs millions in India and AI is already reshaping every role.”
The execution gap is real: while 78% of organizations have deployed AI tools, only 6% of employees feel comfortable using them effectively, according to Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise. That disconnect threatens to stall the returns on billions in infrastructure investment.
As Knowledge Partner, CambrianEdge.ai offered summit participants complimentary 30-day access to its marketing platform, which integrates content creation, research, and analytics workflows. The platform is currently used by over 300 organizations across 20 countries and emphasizes learning AI fluency through real project work rather than classroom training.
To know about more such tech related information, check out our website:
