The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is taking place at Bharat Mandapam in the capital and has brought together a large gathering of international policymakers, technology entrepreneurs, and senior figures from the industry. Events of this kind tend to present themselves as milestones, and this one is no exception, drawing attention not only for its subject but also for the range of people in attendance. Among them is Sara Hooker, co-founder and chief executive of Adaption, an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco.
The ‘Bata’ Discovery That Sparked Social Media Buzz
During her stay in Delhi for the summit, Hooker found herself struck by an unexpected detail of everyday life. She shared on social media her surprise at coming across a Bata store in the city. Posting a photograph of the outlet, she wrote “I grew up with Bata shoes in Eswatini and in Mozambique. Had no idea it was such a universal brand.”
She went on to note that she had not previously understood how extensive the company’s international footprint was. Bata was founded in 1894 in Zlín, then in Czechoslovakia, by Thomas Bata, and over the decades it has grown into a global footwear business. Today, it operates more than 6,000 stores around the world and works with roughly 100,000 independent dealers and franchise partners. Its retail presence appears under several formats, including City Stores, Family Stores, Angela Stores, and AW Lab Stores, all variations of a brand that has quietly made itself familiar in many parts of the world.
Hooker’s remark set off a small stream of replies, many of which revealed how deeply the brand had lodged itself in personal memory. One user observed “We grew up with Bata shoes — all my school shoes were Bata.” Another replied with the pointed comment “Sara, 99.99% of people in India would not know Bata is NOT an Indian brand.”
A third response took the thought further, saying “Bata is such an integral part of our lives here in India that most people think it is an Indian company.” Someone else summed it up more simply, calling Bata “one of India’s most loved brands.”
Delhi Moments Beyond Artificial Intelligence
Beyond the image of the shoe store, Hooker shared a few other impressions from her time in the capital. In one post, she included a photograph taken while her car was stalled in traffic, with India Gate visible in the distance, and remarked that long waits on Delhi’s roads at least offer time to notice familiar landmarks. In another, she turned her attention to a packet of Parle-G biscuits, describing them as the most widely eaten biscuits in the world, and adding, with a note of admiration, that the “G” stood for genius.
Inside the India AI Impact Summit 2026
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is underway at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi and has been presented by its organisers as one of the largest international assemblies devoted to artificial intelligence. It was formally opened to the public on February 17, following an inauguration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier that week. The tone of the occasion has been one of ambition and assurance, as is often the case when governments and industry meet to discuss the future.
The gathering is set to continue until February 21, 2026, and has attracted technology executives, policymakers, and researchers from several countries. The discussions range from commercial applications to questions of governance, though much of the language surrounding them remains abstract.
Who Is Sara Hooker?
Sara Hooker is the co-founder and chief executive of Adaption, a company based in San Francisco. She also heads Cohere Labs, the research division of the artificial intelligence firm Cohere. Earlier in her career, she worked at Google Brain and built a reputation in machine learning research, particularly in areas such as model efficiency, fairness, interpretability, and robustness.
Her work concerns itself with making large language models more efficient and dependable, and less prone to misuse. In addition to her corporate roles, she serves on Kaggle’s ML Advisory Research Board and sits on the World Economic Forum’s council on the Future of Artificial Intelligence. The summit, which continues through February 21, has thus become a meeting point for those who shape not only the tools of artificial intelligence but also the terms on which they are discussed.
Final Words
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 was perhaps intended to be a noble discussion on algorithms, governance and future of artificial intelligence, but a simple shoe store had taken a piece of the cake. The open-minded surprise of Sara Hooker at seeing Bata in Delhi was a wake-up call that even the most global technology giants may be taken by the silent infiltration of the daily brand.
Between the talk about the efficiency of models and the strength of AI, there was the traffic at India Gate, a pack of Parle-G, and a lost childhood memory related to a pair of school shoes. With policymakers arguing about the future of AI, the Bata moment by Hooker highlighted something very human, in a world that is quickly moving towards artificial intelligence, it is the familiar things that bind us together the most.
