In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined India’s up to date Act East Coverage (AEP), increasing the strategic focus of ties to include protection and safety with its Southeast and East Asian companions. Nevertheless, the coverage was not initially conceptualized round safety. Its predecessor, the Look East Coverage (LEP), started within the early Nineties to strengthen financial relations, however transitioned into the AEP as New Delhi acknowledged the strategic crucial of creating protection ties with its prolonged japanese neighborhood.
Whereas the coverage’s first decade efficiently deepened regional protection ties – together with BrahMos offers with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam – India has once more reached a second when it’s trying on the rise of vital and rising applied sciences like synthetic intelligence (AI), and the growing prospect of partnering with its Asian companions on the identical.
This actuality locations AI diplomacy on the very core of India’s AEP. It has develop into obvious that India seeks to realize AI sovereignty throughout 5 layers of the AI stack — software, mannequin, semiconductor, infrastructure, and vitality. For this imaginative and prescient to succeed, its expertise, researchers, and startups urgently require strategic worth chain diversification past conventional companions in Western Europe and Northern America area. Escalating visa constraints, expertise export controls, and the heavy financial toll of one-way expertise mobility point out the structural limits of this dependence.
AEP and Tech Diplomacy: AI on the Forefront
India’s technological cooperation, particularly within the our on-line world area, is already underway with ASEAN and with international locations resembling Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, underscoring the prevailing avenues for technological partnership. Nevertheless, with rising AI adoption and integration, the demand has rapidly shifted towards exploring strategic partnership for AI cooperation and collaboration.
India’s bilateral digital partnership agenda identifies AI as an necessary pillar and emphasizes the exploration of particular AI tasks. As an illustration, the 2026-2030 Plan of Motion to implement the ASEAN-India Complete Strategic Partnership explicitly duties India and ASEAN member states with advancing joint capability constructing and data sharing within the discipline of knowledge and communication applied sciences. Equally, India is exploring partnerships throughout the complete spectrum of the AI stack with Japan. Nevertheless, for this ambition to show into actuality, India should transfer past joint statements and establish particular tasks and initiatives for co-creation, collaboration, and co-development of AI options.
The strategic logic for technological partnership has by no means been extra vital. The current episode of the USA imposing AI-related export controls and restrictions is a living proof. Whereas on this entrance, some developments have already taken place, they’re too little and too insignificant contemplating the problem at hand.
Strategic Partnership on AI: Co-Creation and Funding
On April 21, 2026, the First India-Japan AI Strategic Dialogue happened, which operationalized the Japan-India AI Cooperation Initiative (JAI) launched throughout Modi’s go to to Japan in August 2025. Whereas India-Japan financial cooperation dates again a good distance, a revitalized curiosity amongst Japanese media giants, fast-moving client items (FMCG) corporations, and even some expertise and engineering labs and MSMEs within the Indian market clearly signifies their have to pivot their market enlargement methods and diversify their reliance on the U.S. and Chinese language markets.
This eastward momentum is additional strengthened by the launch of the India-Korea Digital Bridge in April 2026, designed to drive deep bilateral cooperation throughout AI, semiconductors, and the broader electronics and IT sector. Equally, beneath the 2026-2030 Plan of Motion, India and ASEAN governments are exploring areas for collaboration to develop research on AI governance, requirements, and instruments. It subsequently stays essential for AEP to pursue an AI Diplomacy pillar, which focuses on strategic analysis cooperation in the beginning.
Analysis cooperation and co-creation stay elementary and delicate points for Indian start-ups and expertise ecosystems to realize sustained progress. It’s noteworthy that AI start-ups and technical expertise swimming pools should not solely composed of people exceptionally expert in STEM and core or utilized AI. Because of the expanded potentialities for knowledge aggregation workflows and customized options engineering in AI, start-ups and expertise ecosystems are shifting from conventional Software program-as-a-Service (SaaS) and BPO-like AI supply fashions towards the intersection of AI-enabled engineering. Moderately than doubling down on the compute-heavy limits of present generative programs, strategic analysis cooperation can permit Indian innovators and their East Asian companions to pioneer different AI evolution trajectories.
The second necessary focus must be attracting AI funding from main expertise corporations in India, notably in chip manufacturing, packaging, and expertise improvement segments. South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese corporations are nicely positioned on this space and may help develop a strong memory-chip industrial ecosystem in India. The success of the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 1.0 has despatched a optimistic message to the conglomerates working within the AI house. ISM 2.0 might be leveraged to draw investments from the East Asian tigers who need to de-risk from the Chinese language market. For this, New Delhi should begin by reaching out to those huge corporations, because it did within the shipbuilding sector.
Constructing High quality-first Expertise Flows
In October 2025, Japan’s ASEAN-Japan Co-Creation Initiative for AI had emphasised human useful resource improvement and the precise co-creation of AI options. It drives joint analysis and improvement in good manufacturing, robotics, and inexperienced applied sciences, whereas constructing culturally attuned AI fashions by means of structured industry-academia-government collaboration. India ought to undertake this mannequin for its AI Diplomacy pillar beneath the AEP because it strikes ahead.
Bilateral applications with international locations like Japan, and Singapore and tech-forward ASEAN companions like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand should mix expertise mobility with real expertise co-creation. Indian engineers and area specialists ought to get positioned in Japanese industrial labs, Singaporean analysis institutes, and regional tech hubs to collectively develop precision AI programs for manufacturing, provide chain optimization and robotics. The data and mental property gained should return with them to strengthen India’s home ecosystems.
Rekindling the Way forward for Provide Chain Integration
India, with its Asian companions, can rekindle deeper provide chain integration by tackling obstacles to doing enterprise by means of focused regulatory and authorized reforms and bilateral fast-track mechanisms. Persistent challenges resembling regulatory complexity, land acquisition delays, excessive logistics prices, and compliance burdens have traditionally slowed FDI regardless of India’s emergence as a horny vacation spot. These impediments power these corporations to discover different locations, resembling Vietnam and Thailand.
Moreover, for AI diplomacy to succeed, India should make the house extra inclusive by together with home startups working within the house, throughout domains and connecting them with their counterparts. The creation of a Expertise Council alongside the traces of the Enterprise Council might be explored. Such a mechanism will allow diplomacy to trickle down, creating pure and sustainable methods for the mechanism to function independently.
Boldly constructing on open requirements and open-source-friendly architectures creates clear, interoperable foundations for AI-driven digital twins in good manufacturing and concrete infrastructure. This reduces vendor lock-in, accelerates co-creation, and allows sooner data in addition to IP diffusion throughout bilateral tasks.
Contemplating the evolving nature of the fashionable economic system and its intersection with superior applied sciences resembling AI, it could be prudent for India to incorporate AI diplomacy in its financial safety dialogue with like-minded international locations. Now we have already seen this within the case of India-Japan and India-South Korea ties. Whereas India’s AI improvement will take time domestically, constructing strategic partnerships on the AI stack must develop into an necessary a part of its diplomacy and international coverage, and one of the best ways to begin is with the AEP.
