The DPI Exchange: New Corridors for Innovation and Inclusion

The Observer Research Foundation in partnership with ORF Middle East convened “The DPI Exchange: New Corridors for Innovation and Inclusion” on 27 January 2026. Organised as a pre-summit event for the 2026 India AI Impact Summit, the event gathered policy professionals, researchers, and private-sector leaders to examine how digital public infrastructure (DPI) is shaping inclusive growth, competition, and artificial intelligence (AI) development across the Global South. The event included two sessions titled New Diplomacy: The AI-DPI Convergence and Frameworks for Cooperation and Maximal Markets: DPI, Enterprise and Innovation. Discussants explored the convergence of public infrastructure, private innovation, regional coordination, and the need for establishing open, interoperable architectures to counter market concentration and prevent the Global South from becoming dependent on external platforms and extractive data practices.

Key Takeaways

• Open systems and interoperability: Open protocols were identified as being essential for preserving market competition and accelerating innovation. Discussants noted that proprietary systems have historically enabled rapid commercialisation while contributing to market concentration and creating structural barriers to entry. Open networks offer a viable alternative by preventing control by a few dominant intermediaries and supporting broader participation and locally relevant innovation. This distinction is crucial to African markets where open architectures can allow African economies to shape their own digital trajectories through South-South partnerships rather than importing externally designed models.
• Cultivating accessibility and trust: DPI is a promising vehicle to serve populations at the margins, such as nomadic or undocumented groups, rather than just formally documented users.  Addressing such forms of exclusion requires technical sophistication as well as cultivating public trust towards digital platforms. To promote digital inclusion, the discussion noted the role of building local capacity and utilizing youth as inter-generational knowledge intermediaries as possible approaches to bridging this gap outside urban centres.
• Promoting DPI-AI synergy: Open networks were observed as being critical for generating high-quality, interoperable data necessary to fuel AI to enable diverse and decentralized AI development. The discussion explored how India’s layered DPI model is showcasing this synergy by deploying AI to deepen infrastructure reach through voice-based interfaces for users with linguistic constraints while simultaneously safeguarding trust through real-time fraud detection and transaction monitoring. This approach reinforces the ability of the Global South to build AI ecosystems that are inclusive and development-oriented and contextually relevant.
• Preventing over-regulation: Discussants highlighted the importance of balancing oversight with flexibility to facilitate private-sector participation through a ‘middle-path’ regulatory approach. In the African context, wherever markets are fragmented, cross-border data flows and regional interoperability are essential for scaling digital services. The gap between policymakers and the private sector must be narrowed through partnerships and regulatory sandboxes to ensure that frameworks remain grounded in technological and market realities. Public and private systems need to be integrated to ensure innovation is scalable, interoperable, and aligned with broader development goals.