Walking into the Bharat Mandapam for the recently concluded India-AI Impact Summit 2026, one couldn’t help but feel the weight of the "Sutras." The air was thick with the scent of expensive coffee and the electric hum of 38,000 GPUs—or at least the promise of them. Outside, the Delhi smog remained stubbornly unimpressed by the "Planet" pillar of the summit, but inside, the world was being rewritten in Python and Sanskrit.
Walking into the Bharat Mandapam for the recently concluded India-AI Impact Summit 2026, one couldn’t help but feel the weight of the "Sutras." The air was thick with the scent of expensive coffee and the electric hum of 38,000 GPUs—or at least the promise of them. Outside, the Delhi smog remained stubbornly unimpressed by the "Planet" pillar of the summit, but inside, the world was being rewritten in Python and Sanskrit.
The event, a five-day marathon from February 16 to 20, 2026 was billed as the Global South’s answer to Silicon Valley’s existential dread. While the West worries about AI killing us all, India is more concerned with whether AI can tell a farmer in Vidarbha when it’s actually going to rain.
One of the most touted sessions was on Generative AI and LLMs in Regional Languages. We’ve all seen ChatGPT struggle with Hindi idioms, but the summit unveiled "BharatGen," a government-backed multimodal model. The goal? To make AI speak the 22 scheduled languages of India without the "Western accent" of thought.
In the Fintech and Financial Services track, the talk was all about "MuleHunter.AI" and stopping fraud before it happens. India is effectively building an "AI Stack" on top of its existing digital public infrastructure (DPI). The vision is seamless: your face is your ID, your voice is your signature, and an AI is your accountant.
The Healthcare pavilion showcased Diagnostic AI that can spot tuberculosis from a cough recorded on a Rs. 10,000 smartphone. "Availability, Affordability, and Accessibility," was the mantra. Yet, the question remains: when the AI makes a wrong diagnosis in a rural clinic, who does the patient sue? The algorithm or the government?
Agriculture saw the launch of MausamGPT, a chatbot designed for "Precision Farming." It’s supposed to give localized weather advisories. During a panel, a representative from a farming collective noted, "The AI tells us to use less fertilizer, but the local dealer only sells the big bags. We need more than just smart code; we need a smart supply chain."
In Education, the "AI4All" initiative promised personalized tutors for every child. It sounds like a sci-fi dream, but in a country where many schools still struggle with basic electricity, the reliance on high-end AI Infrastructure and Data Centers—another major summit theme—feels like putting the cart before the horse. Or rather, the GPU before the classroom.
Among the sea of enterprise solutions, a few startups stood out by embracing the "weirdness" of Generative AI. NAVSAR, a startup making waves in AI-driven creativity, seemed to bridge the gap between "Governance" and "Imagination."
Navsar isn't just about spreadsheets; it’s into AI book writing, generating videos that simulate both real and fictional lives, and even full-scale AI movie making. I caught up with Navin Manaswi, the co-founder of NAVSAR, near the "Democratizing AI" pavilion.
"The summit talks about infrastructure, but we focus on the soul of the machine," Manaswi told me, his eyes bright despite the grueling schedule. "With NAVSAR, we are proving that AI can be a co-creator. Whether it's a novel that writes itself based on your memories or a movie where the protagonist is... well, you. We are moving from 'AI as a tool' to 'AI as a visionary'."
When asked about the impact of the IndiaAI Mission's 10,000-crore outlay, Manaswi was optimistic but cautious. "The compute power is coming. But for startups like us, we need more than just GPUs. We need a culture that isn't afraid of 'synthetic creativity.' People ask if AI movies will replace Bollywood. I say, AI will let everyone have their own Bollywood."
The Manufacturing and IoT sessions were perhaps the most "grounded," focusing on predictive maintenance for factories. But the real tension lay in Governance and Public Service. The newly unveiled MANAV Framework (Moral and Ethical... I forget what the 'A' and 'V' stood for in the excitement) is India's attempt to regulate AI without strangling it.
The summit ended with the "New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments," a voluntary pact that sounds great on paper but lacks the "teeth" of the EU’s AI Act.
Story of some AI startups
The air in central business district of Bangalore office carries a distinct hum – not just from the servers, but from the palpable creative tension. It's late 2024, and I'm sitting across from a small team that's about to attempt something the global film industry has only dared to dream about. We're talking about NavSar (navsar.tech) , a name that's been circulating in tech-art circles with a growing sense of anticipation. They are, as I write this, in the final throes of post-production on what they claim is the world's first full-length AI feature film. And they're not just doing it with a bunch of coders in a dark room; they've got skin in the game from some pretty serious global investors and, most intriguingly, a hybrid crew of both flesh-and-blood artists and their AI counterparts.
To understand why this moment feels so significant, you have to rewind a bit. We've seen AI-generated shorts, music videos that are trippy as hell, and those slick advertising spots where everything morphs into everything else. But a feature film? A narrative that needs to hold an audience's attention for ninety minutes? That's a whole different beast. It requires structure, emotional consistency, and a soul – things we're not used to associating with algorithms.
NavSar's approach, from what I've gathered, isn't about replacing the human element but rather augmenting it into overdrive. The "resource support" they mention from global investors isn't just a cheque; it's a bet on a new creative workflow. Imagine a director who can storyboard a complex chase sequence not with crude sketches, but with photorealistic moving images generated in seconds. Imagine a costume designer who can describe a garment in natural language – "a silk gown that refracts light like a shattered prism, but with the weight of centuries" – and see fifty variations materialize before their eyes. That's the sandbox they're playing in.
But it's the fusion that's key. They're not just prompting an AI and hitting "render." They've assembled a team of traditional artists – illustrators, concept painters, a veteran editor from the Bollywood industry who apparently had to be convinced to come out of semi-retirement. These artists work in tandem with the AI models. The human provides the intent, the emotional core, the "why." The AI provides the endless iteration, the visual exploration, the ability to bend light and physics in ways that would have required a Crore rupees and a hundred VFX artists just a decade ago.
I spoke briefly with one of the project's lead animators, a young woman named Anya who cut her teeth on traditional 2D animation. She told me, "At first, I felt threatened. I thought, 'This box is going to take my job.' But then you realize it's just another tool, like a brush you never had. I can sketch a character's raw emotion in five strokes, and then use the AI to build the entire world around that feeling in a thousand different ways. It's exhausting and exhilarating. It's like the software is dreaming with you." That phrase stuck with me. Dreaming with you.
The film itself is still under wraps, but whispers suggest it's a mythological sci-fi piece, drawing on deep Indian lore but set in a hyper-futuristic, decaying metropolis. The kind of story where the visual scale needs to be epic to match the philosophical questions it's asking. And that's where the tech becomes inseparable from the tale. You simply cannot make a film with that kind of visual ambition on a traditional budget without AI. It democratizes the grand vision.
This brings me, quite naturally, to the man who seems to be at the epicenter of this new reality's creation. Navin Manaswi isn't just a consultant you call when you want a chatbot. The guy is a one-man ecosystem for the future of digital existence. His venture, wowexp.ai , is a fascinating beast. If NavSar is building the content for the new world, wowexp is building the canvas.
Landing on the wowexp.ai site, you're immediately hit with the scale of their ambition: "Leading the Future of Digital Reality." It's a bold claim, but when you see who's backing them – or at least, who's trusting them – it gains weight. Partnerships with PwC, Infosys, and the AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) aren't the kind of things you land with just a slick PowerPoint. These are institutional validations. PwC doesn't put its name on the line lightly, and Infosys partnering for "technology innovation and digital transformation" signals that wowexp's tech is being looked at for serious, industrial-scale applications.
Manaswi's own trajectory explains why. The guy isn't just another tech founder. He's a Generative AI Expert who has literally helped write the rulebook for this stuff on a global stage. The fact that he represented India at ITU-T in Geneva and initiated 3 Global Standards on AI, AI Safety, Digital Twins and Metaverse is a huge deal. It means he's not just building products; he's helping shape the regulatory and technical frameworks that will govern how this technology is used worldwide. When you're dealing with something as foundational as a "Digital Twin" – a perfect virtual replica of a real-world system – having your guy be the one who helped define what that means globally is a massive competitive advantage.
And wowexp's product suite reflects this foundational thinking. It's not just about making a cool game. It's about building the plumbing.
Their Computer Vision stuff – real-time object detection, facial recognition – is the sensory layer. It's how the digital world sees the physical one. Their Digital Twin technology is the simulation layer. Imagine a perfect virtual copy of a factory floor, a city's traffic grid, or even a human heart. You can run simulations, predict failures, and optimize performance in the safe sandbox of the digital twin before touching the real thing. It's what allows an engineer in Mumbai to figure out why a machine in a factory in Germany is about to fail, days before it actually happens. That's the kind of "performance optimization" and "predictive maintenance" they talk about.
But the layer that connects NavSar's film to wowexp's broader mission is Agentic AI. This is the part that genuinely makes you stop and think. These aren't just chatbots that answer questions. These are autonomous AI agents that can "reason, plan, and execute complex tasks independently with human-like decision making capabilities." In the context of the metaverse, these aren't just NPCs (non-player characters) following a script. They are entities that can have goals, adapt to the player's actions, and drive a narrative forward in unscripted ways. For a filmmaker like the one at NavSar, this technology is pure gold. Imagine populating the background of a massive cityscape not with digital extras doing the same looped animation, but with thousands of unique AI agents, each living their own simulated life, reacting to the environment and to the protagonists in real-time. It blurs the line between a static film and a living, breathing world.
So, you see the connection. Navin Manaswi, through wowexp, is building the fundamental technologies – the vision, the simulation, the autonomous intelligence – that companies like NavSar can then use to weave their stories. It's a symbiotic relationship. Wowexp provides the engine, the physics, and the digital citizens. NavSar provides the soul, the narrative, and the art.
Thinking about both of these ventures together, you start to see the outlines of a complete stack for a new creative industry. The NavSar film, backed by global money and built by a hybrid human-AI team, is the proof-of-concept. It's the blockbuster that will (hopefully) show the world that this isn't just a gimmick. It's a new medium. And if that film succeeds, the demand for the tools that wowexp is building will explode. Every studio, every ad agency, every game developer will want their own Agentic AI. Every city planner will want a Digital Twin. Every retailer will want advanced Computer Vision.
Of course, it's not all smooth sailing. There are a million things that could go wrong. The NavSar film could be a technical marvel but a narrative dud. Audiences might reject the "uncanny valley" feeling of AI-generated imagery for a full 90 minutes. There are massive ethical questions about copyright, about the displacement of human artists (despite Anya's optimism), and about the energy consumption required to render worlds at this scale.
And then there's the metaverse itself. The concept has been hyped to death and back, only to stumble as the technology couldn't quite deliver the promise. But wowexp's focus on enterprise solutions – working with the likes of PwC and Infosys – is smart. They're building the back-end, the B2B infrastructure, the stuff that makes money while the consumer-facing side figures itself out. It's a more stable bet.
Walking out of that Versova office, past whiteboards covered in cryptic notes about latent diffusion models and shot compositions, I felt a strange mix of excitement and unease. This is happening. It's not some distant future. A team in Mumbai, with a visionary founder who helped write the global standards for AI, is about to drop a film made by algorithms and artists, working hand-in-hand. And a few kilometers away, the same founder's company is building the digital twins and autonomous agents that will populate the worlds this film hints at.
Navin Manaswi's journey from IIT Kanpur to representing India in Geneva, from authoring three books to training corporates like Tata Motors and Salesforce, has all been building to this nexus. He's not just predicting the future; he's building the standards for it with wowexp, while backing the art that will define it with NavSar.
The film is rolling out shortly. I, for one, will be in line on opening day. Not just to be entertained, but to witness the first real shot fired in a new kind of creative revolution. Whether it's a masterpiece or a magnificent failure, it's going to be one hell of a thing to see. And it's being built right here, by a team of humans and their new, tireless, infinitely creative digital collaborators. The dream is finally being rendered.
As the lights dimmed at Bharat Mandapam, the "200 billion dollars in investment pledges" hung in the air like a heavy cloud. India has successfully positioned itself as the "Voice of the Global South" in the AI conversation. We have the data, we have the talent, and now, we have the "Chakras."
But as Navin Manaswi of NAVSAR aptly put it during his closing remarks at a side event: "Technology is the skeleton, but content and culture are the flesh. India must ensure its AI doesn't just process data, but actually understands the Indian heart."
Whether the "AI Impact" will be a bang or a whimper depends on whether these 38,000 GPUs end up in the hands of the dreamers—like the team at Navsar—or just stay locked in the data centers of the elite. All these are legitimate concerns. But why we cannot think positively.
(The content of this article reflects the views of writer and contributor, not necessarily those of the publisher and editor. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only)
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