HTLS Summit 2026: The latest edition of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit brings together influential voices to examine changing realities across economies, geopolitics, technology, business and society as the world enters an era defined by rapid disruption and unprecedented change.
6:18 PM IST, Nov 12India’s AI journey intersects with local languages and culture, says Caltech Prof
6:11 PM IST, Nov 12Caltech Professor on need for different benchmarks to measure AI's impact
6:01 PM IST, Nov 12All about Animashree Anandkumar, Caltech Professor and Accelerated Understanding co-founder
6:00 PM IST, Nov 12Speed is only one aspect of the broader AI story: Caltech Professor
5:49 PM IST, Nov 12Travel will always come back with a vengeance, says VFS Global CEO
5:37 PM IST, Nov 12The wish to travel never goes away, says VFS Global CEO
5:33 PM IST, Nov 12Where Indian students are heading, as per CEO of VFS Global
5:23 PM IST, Nov 12India is the powerhouse of global mobility, says VFS Global CEO
4:44 PM IST, Nov 12All about Zubin Karkaria, first speaker at HT Leadership Summit 2026
4:17 PM IST, Nov 12All about the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit
4:06 PM IST, Nov 12Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026 kicks off today
HTLS Summit 2026: The Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026 kicked off today (November 12), with two virtual sessions. The 24th edition of the event brings together influential voices to examine changing realities across economies, geopolitics, technology, business and society as the world enters an era defined by rapid disruption and unprecedented change....
This year’s summit will examine the forces reshaping how people live, lead, and shape the future. The theme, "New Rules. New Realities", captures a world in which established assumptions are being questioned, and new opportunities are taking shape. The summit also aims to examine how leaders can navigate a landscape where certainty is increasingly being replaced by adaptation.
Two sessions were held on Day 1. Zubin Karkaria, founder and CEO of VFS Global, spoke to Nisheeth Upadhyay, Editor and COO of Hindustan Times Digital. The second session featured Anima Anandkumar, co-founder of Accelerated Understanding and Bren Professor at Caltech, speaking with Vishal Mathur, Technology Editor at Hindustan Times.
Launched in 2003, the HT Leadership Summit was established to enhance the level of discourse on critical issues, bring leaders from important fields together and provide an international-standard platform for exchanging ideas and exploring solutions.
This blog is closed.
This live blog is closed. For the latest updates on HTLS 2026, click here: HTLS 2026.
India’s AI journey intersects with local languages and culture, says Caltech Professor
At the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Animashree Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, urged policymakers, researchers, and founders not to fall into the trap of chasing large language models in isolation.
Anandkumar—a distinguished alumna of IIT Madras—pointed to the vibrant startup activity in hard engineering domains such as space technology and battery development as India’s true competitive strength.
“I see a lot of startups and not necessarily only in the language model space, but in the broader right. Such as space, batteries, and similar hard engineering. That is also the real strength that we should not lose track of,” she said.
“AI can help with all those processes, but it's important to think in this broader way. Language models are great, but they're not the only thing to invest our focus on. When it comes to the frontier language models, I think the important thing to keep in mind is local languages and accessibility, and that's something uniquely India can do.
More than a century ago, R. Shamasastry, a pioneering epigraphist, unearthed and translated Kautilya’s Arthashastra, an ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy, with manuscripts preserved on fragile strips of dried palm leaf. Shamasastry is the great-great-grandfather of Anandkumar.
“UNESCO recognised Arthashastra, an ancient text, as one of the treasures from India. And I have a really interesting connection: my great-great-grandfather discovered Kautilya's Arthashastra more than a century ago. Using AI even to understand our rich history, our culture, and our local traditions is important. We shouldn't just be focusing on one thing, but having investments across the board—invest in technical research, in humanities, and really grow that knowledge and make that first digitised, use AI, and then build AI,” says Anandkumar, calling it a “full circle”.
Caltech Professor on the need for different benchmarks to measure AI's impact
Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026, Caltech Professor Animashree Anandkumar said, “Yeah, certainly. And this is where it's really difficult to do benchmarks of frontier tasks, right? Like, because discovery is about something new. I mean, if it's already published, if it's already there in the dataset, these language models can very easily claim that discovery. And that's where you see it also with language models: the evaluations are continuously just evolving, right? So, they're getting, like, different.”
“And still, you can't keep up with them. And if you see the latest models, it's almost like the validation is challenging real-world problems, like the Millennium Prize Problem in math, right?”
All about Animashree Anandkumar, Caltech Professor and Accelerated Understanding co-founder
Animashree Anandkumar is the co-founder of Accelerated Understanding and Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
She has helped build high-resolution weather models and to design catheters that resist infection. Prior to these breakthroughs, Anandkumar had made her name in machine learning theory and in industry, as a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services and later a senior director of machine learning research at NVIDIA.
Her work has earned her the Blavatnik Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, and TIME named her among the most influential people in AI this year.
Speed is only one aspect of the broader AI story, says Caltech Prof Anandkumar
Anima Anandkumar, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) professor, believes speed is only a part of the artificial intelligence (AI) story, and that AI also allows for better accuracy and reliability in scientific modelling.
"It's not just that it's faster with less reliable predictions. In fact, it's more accurate, more reliable at this point—what AI can do—compared to traditional models," she said on Thursday at a virtual session of the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
Anandkumar is a Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech.
Travel will always come back with a vengeance, says VFS Global CEO
The Covid pandemic and global wars were widely expected to choke international travel. But each time, it came back faster than expected, said VFS Global founder and CEO Zubin Karkaria at the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
“Whatever geopolitics or whatever environmental conditions are there in the world, travel will always come back, and it will come back with a vengeance,” he added.
Crises cause only brief anxiety or logistical hurdles, during which domestic travel picks up, Karkaria said, adding that post-Covid “revenge travel” showed that the urge never waned.
The wish to travel never goes away, says VFS Global CEO on geopolitics and migration debates
Zubin Karkaria, founder and CEO of VFS Global, said the wish to travel never goes away. After COVID it came back as what was called "revenge travel".
“Trouble spots only pause things briefly, and domestic travel picks up in the meantime.” He listed SARS, H1N1, COVID, Russia-Ukraine and the conflicts in West Asia.
Beyond US, UK: Where Indian students are heading, as per CEO of VFS Global
For decades, an Indian student going abroad to study was likely to end up in the US, the UK, Canada or Australia. That map is being redrawn, VFS Global founder Zubin Karkaria said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Thursday.
“Traditionally, the students always travelled to the US, Canada, Australia, UK. And now what we are seeing is a shift to Europe,” Karkaria said. “There’s a growth of students travelling to Europe by almost 70% every year.”
Germany, Austria, Spain and France are among the countries drawing them. And the biggest shift is in who makes the decision.
India is the powerhouse of global mobility, says VFS Global CEO
VFS Global CEO Zubin Karkaria, speaking at HTLS 2026, called India the “powerhouse of global mobility”.
“Now, it's a necessity, not a luxury, and people travel three to four times a year,” he said.
He says India is the second-largest source market for students and could become number one. It also sends the most skilled labour abroad, as well as people visiting friends and relatives, he said.
All about Zubin Karkaria, first speaker at HT Leadership Summit 2026
Zubin Karkaria founded VFS Global in 2001. The company plays a key role in international mobility, serving as the operational backbone for global travellers by managing document collection and appointment scheduling. It works with more than 70 governments worldwide and helps millions of people travel internationally.
His firm aims to ease the logistical burden on foreign embassies and consulates, allowing diplomatic staff to focus on visa decision-making and security assessments.
Theme for this year's HT Leadership Summit
This year’s summit will examine the forces reshaping how people live, lead, and shape the future.
The theme, "New Rules. New Realities", captures a world in which established assumptions are being questioned, and new opportunities are taking shape.
Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026 kicks off today
The Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026 kicks off today (November 12), with two sessions lined up for Thursday. The 24th edition of the event will bring together influential voices to examine changing realities across economies, geopolitics, technology, business and society as the world enters an era defined by rapid disruption and unprecedented change.
This year’s summit will examine the forces reshaping how people live, lead, and shape the future. The theme, "New Rules. New Realities", captures a world in which established assumptions are being questioned, and new opportunities are taking shape.
The summit also aims to examine how leaders can navigate a landscape where certainty is increasingly being replaced by adaptation.
