Catalyzing Dialogues on AI in India
The Center has hosted five major dialogues on AI, bringing together Columbia faculty and leading voices from India to explore how AI is being used in health, finance, business, and digital ecosystems. These conversations have moved beyond hype to focus on what works, what doesn’t, and what responsible AI adoption should look like in the Indian context.
As India stands on the cusp of its next phase of growth, few forces are as consequential—or as contested—as artificial intelligence. From healthcare and finance to education, climate, and creative expression, AI is no longer a future-facing concept but a present-day catalyst reshaping how societies function. Recognizing both the promise and the complexity of this moment, Columbia Global Center Mumbai has deliberately positioned AI as a strategically important dialogue platform—one that brings together global scholarship and Indian realities to ask the most pressing questions of our time.
Through its AI Rising series over the last two years, the Center hosted multiple dialogues on AI, convening Columbia faculty alongside leading voices from India to examine how AI is being deployed across health systems, financial services, and enterprise. These conversations have moved beyond hype to focus on real-world application, risk, governance, and measurable impact—especially in the Indian context, where scale, cost, and inclusion shape every technological shift.
India Inc.: Can AI Go From Risky Gamble to Winning Game Changer?
In February, the Fourth Mumbai Forum hosted by Columbia Business School's Jerome A. Chazen Institute and the Mumbai Center brought together researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for an evening that moved between the frontier of AI research and the urgent realities of deploying it in a country of 1.4 billion. Professor Olivier Toubia of Columbia Business School opened with findings from the school's large-scale Digital Twins project — revealing that while AI-generated simulations of human behaviour show genuine promise for market research and personalisation, they currently function more like funhouse mirrors than true reflections, prone to stereotyping, homogenisation, and ideological bias. Entrepreneur Rajesh Jain followed with a grounded look at how layering behavioural and contextual data can transform brand-customer communication from generic to genuinely personal. The evening closed with a lively Oxford-style debate moderated by Gita Johar, Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business, Columbia Business School on whether rapid AI adoption will be a net positive for India — with Sameer Shetty of Axis Bank and Pranay Mehrotra of BCG arguing for the motion, and former SBI Chairman Om Prakash Bhatt and TCS's Satish Byravan arguing against. What emerged was less a disagreement about AI itself and more a pointed conversation about pace, governance, and who bears the cost when systems fail at scale — a debate the audience, by a narrow margin, left unresolved.
Bridging Innovation: Leveraging AI to Transform Industry
In February, the Center convened Bridging Innovation: Leveraging AI to Transform Industry, bringing together Shih-Fu Chang, Columbia Engineering Dean, Vishal Misra, Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments and as Vice Dean of Computing and AI, Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, Executive Vice President of Columbia Global and leading industry voices to explore what it takes to move AI from the laboratory to real-world impact across healthcare and fintech.
Rizwan Koita, chairperson of the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and co-founder & Director of the Koita Foundation, offered a grounded portrait of AI's promise and limits in Indian healthcare — from infrastructure gaps and affordability constraints to linguistic diversity and the near-absent digitisation of clinical records — arguing that cracking this market could unlock scalable solutions for much of the developing world.
On the research front, Dr. Elham Azizi explored how AI is advancing cancer care through digital biology, while Dr. Sunil Agrawal demonstrated how robotics and AI are reshaping neurorehabilitation for patients with stroke, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injuries. In finance, Prof. Junfeng Yang warned of AI vulnerabilities including hallucinations, deepfakes, and automated fraud, and Prof. Baishakhi Ray examined the challenges of deploying AI within highly regulated financial environments. Fractal co-founder Srikant Velankani rounded out the evening by making the case that organizations must move beyond automation to fundamentally reimagine their processes, technology investments, and workforces — with responsible deployment and workforce transformation as essential, not optional.
AI has also emerged as a unifying thread across the Center’s broader research and programmatic work. Whether in discussions on cancer and advanced imaging, biomedical innovation, or initiatives like Hip Hop Health that explore creative approaches to behavior change, AI increasingly acts as connective tissue—augmenting research, enabling new methodologies, and expanding the scale of impact.
Learn more about the center's past convenins on AI