India’s PM Modi heads to France on Monday for AI Summit

New Delhi: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will head to France on Monday, his first foreign visit of 2025, to attend the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit and will also inaugurate a consulate in Marseille in the south of France. The AI Summit will be co-chaired by PM Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron as focus grows on governance and rules for Artificial Intelligence. While India and France are looking to come up with a joint road map for AI, the summit’s expected outcomes include the announcement of an AI foundation, how AI impacts the world, including the job market, and issues relating to safety.

“Artificial Intelligence is bound to have and is already having profound impact across all sectors of the economy, polity, society, and governance. And therefore, summits such as the AI Action Summit are both significant and timely. For those of you who follow AI closely, you would be aware that this is the third such high-level summit that is being held in the very recent past. The first of these was in the UK in 2023, the second one in the Republic of Korea in 2024, and now this one in France,” India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri said last week while sharing details of PM Modi’s visit to the country.

Other world leaders present at the summit include German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canada’s outgoing PM Justin Trudeau, President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyen, Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg, Rwanda President Paul Kagame, Netherlands PM Sick Schoof, Greece PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Estonia President Alar Karis, Latvia President Edgars Rinkevics, Sweden PM Ulf Kristersson, Finland PM Petteri Orpo, Luxembourg PM Luc Frieden, Ireland Taoiseach, Croatia PM Andrej Plenkovic, Slovenia PM Robert Golob, Togo President Faure Gnassingbe, Slovakia President Peter Pellegrini, Czech Republic President Petr Pavel, Djibouti PM Abdoulkader Kamil Mohamed, Comoros President Azali Assoumani, Malta PM Robert Abela, Albania PM Edi Rama and Armenia PM Nikol Pashinyan. 

China will be represented by Vice Premier Guoqing Zhang, US by Vice President VD Vance, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will also be present.
Other than world leaders, the summit will see the participation of leaders from tech, finance and AI sectors. This includes Sundar Pichai of Google, Sam Altman of OpenAI, financial titans like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Yasir Al Rumayyan from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, tech innovators such as Lisa Su of AMD and Clément Delangue of Hugging Face, and policy and ethics advocates like Meredith Whittaker from Signal and Alexandra Reeve Givens from the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Also, this is the 2nd time that India and France are coming together for an issue that has global impact, after climate. In 2015, on the sidelines of the Paris climate summit, India and France announced the International Solar Alliance (ISA), which seeks to harness the energy of the sun and today has over 100 signatures.

The upcoming visit of PM Modi to France is his second one to the country since 2023, when he was invited to be the chief guest at the Bastille Day parade in Paris. 

During the visit, both PM Modi and French President Macron will inaugurate the Indian Consulate in Marseille, which is expected to help in consular support to Indians in the south of France. Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast, is expected to be the key point, along with Mumbai, of the India-Middle East Europe corridor that was announced during the Delhi 2023 G20 summit.