The Regional Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact Conference 2025, a flagship regional event leading up to the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, was held at the State Convention Centre in Shillong on Wednesday.
Virtually addressing conference, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnav said, “During this conference in Shillong, the focus will be on people, planet and progress, which are the three pillars, the three sutras of the AI impact summit.”
Vaishnav spoke on the central government’s mission to develop AI in the country. “As a part of this mission, we have allocated Rs 10,300 crore over the past five years. We have created a common computing facility for everybody to get access to AI resources and more than 38,000 Graphics Processing Unit (GPUs) have so far been onboarded,” he added. Underscoring the importance of access to AI in order to increase productivity, the Union Minister shared that 570 data and AI labs have been set up, out of which 30 have been launched. He informed that one lab set up at the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NEILIT), Shillong, is functional while two more labs will be set up at ITI (Industrial Training Institute), Shillong and Shillong Polytechnic. Additionally, another lab is in pipeline at ITI, Tura. “Our target is to train about one million people in AI skills, because that is going to define the employability in future. Overall, the focus is to make sure that every part of the country gets access to this new technology,” he added further.
Organised by the Government of Meghalaya in collaboration with the India-AI Mission under the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, the conference has brought together senior government officials, technology leaders, academic experts and innovators to discuss the transformative potential of AI. Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said that the government has decided that all its decisions will be data driven even as he informed that the Government is effectively using AI solutions to implement different projects and programmes like the Mothers app. He also said that the Government is also using AI technology to map the 75000 water springs. In addition, AI Technology is being used to map the forest coverage in the state.