As the world confronts competing visions of its future, NDTV World Summit 2026 will bring together some of the most consequential voices in contemporary politics, diplomacy, business, technology, and culture to examine the choices that will define humanity’s collective future.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will headline the summit and deliver a keynote address. Over two days, this thought-leadership dialogue will bring political authority, diplomatic experience, scientific inquiry, entrepreneurial ambition, and creative imagination into conversation, offering perspectives on a world undergoing profound change. The Summit will also host international leaders, diplomats, and thinkers to discuss the economic and strategic shifts shaping a world between orders. UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, Nepal’s Federal Minister of Finance Swarnim Wagle, and Sri Lanka’s Deputy Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development Chaturanga Abeysinghe will bring perspectives from countries whose relationships with India are increasingly economically and strategically significant.
General David Petraeus, former Director of the CIA, Partner at KKR and Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, will bring decades of military and strategic experience to the discussion on conflict and technological change. Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, will offer his reading of the historical and political forces shaping the present. Joining him in the wider examination of AI will be Mike Walsh, futurist and AI specialist; Alex Turner, AI researcher and former research scientist at Google DeepMind; and Nicholas Butts, Director of AI and Cybersecurity Policy at Microsoft. Together, their contributions will span the organisational, societal and strategic implications of a technology advancing faster than the institutions seeking to understand and govern it. India’s role in this evolving international landscape will be central. Dr S Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs, will bring his perspective on the diplomatic choices confronting India, while Sanjay Malhotra, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, will address the economic conditions shaping the country’s prospects. Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Railways, Information and Broadcasting, and Electronics and Information Technology, will bring a policy perspective to India’s technological ambitions. His participation will place semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure within the wider discussion on India’s economic competitiveness and its role in global technology supply chains. “At the NDTV World Summit, we are bringing together people whose experience and expertise can help make sense of what we see as a very complex geopolitical reality. We have never seen such uncertainty, experienced such technological disruption in the way AI is manifesting itself, or questioned the very existence of humanity as we do now.
The range of speakers allows us to examine the changes underway from several perspectives and ask questions that go beyond the daily news cycle,” said Shiv Aroor, Managing Editor, NDTV.
