The Performance Of AI Readiness And Its Gendered Cost

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 could have been an opportunity. When Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a scientific fiction, but has sped into our everyday lives, the Summit was conceptualised to deliberate on its ethical governance and inclusive deployment. It aimed to position India as the first Global South host and co-shaper of global AI frameworks.

Yet the moment unfolded into a spectacle.

Galgotias University stirred a controversy by misrepresenting an AI-equipped robot as its in-house innovation during the summit. The ensuing fiasco led the organisers to ask the university stall to vacate its pavilion. The university issued multiple statements, ultimately apologising and stating their representative, a woman professor, was “ill-informed” and “not authorised to speak.”

Following this, the conversation quickly drifted away from AI innovation onto the media’s frenzied enthusiasm to cover the scandal, exploding sensational headlines, and unchecked social media opinions - collectively trivialising the Summit in public discourse and turning it into a theatre of accusations.

The gendered anatomy of public trials

At its most disturbing, the controversy settled on a woman’s body and her competence. Her credibility and legitimacy were dissected in public, and the tone of such scrutiny was moralistic, personal, and deeply insinuating. It reverberated the tired trope that women are either ornamental, ill-informed or undeserving of their platforms. The scrutiny pivoted to her personal character, where her presence, legitimacy, and worthiness were judged. The entire imagination - fixated on whether the woman deserved her platform!

This is not a singular instance. Feminist scholarship has long observed that women in public authority are often treated as embodiments of institutional virtue or failure. Their presence is scrutinised, missteps generalised, and their authority is assumed to be provisional. Especially in moments of crisis, trials of women have always been a symbolic act of restoring order, an easier narrative than confronting structural fragility. This has always been a ritual of gendered accountability, where facts are misplaced by reputation dissection.

In the specific context of the Summit, where AI raises profound questions about bias, power and structural inequality, we failed to interrogate these dynamics and instead enacted them. We gendered the struggle over technological power.

This gendered scrutiny, however, performed a convenient function. It narrowed systemic critique into individual culpability. It displaced attention away from deeper questions like: What does ‘AI readiness’ actually mean? Who defines it? What asymmetries of capital, data and regulatory power shape India's entry into the AI economy? And whose interests ultimately govern the terms on which we participate in this technological future?

And this leads to the actual uncomfortable question that emerged from the entire fiasco: the anxious performance of ‘AI readiness’ by Global South tech research and development.

The Burden of Performing AI Readiness

Across South Asia, artificial intelligence has come to function not merely as a site of innovation but as a signifier of techno-modernism. To be aligned with AI is to signal relevance and participation in global knowledge production. For Global South universities/research institutions, this alignment carries a disproportionate weight.

They are already operating within stratified transnational knowledge hierarchies. Here, research capital, citation power, technological infrastructure and agenda-setting authority remain heavily concentrated in the Global North. Moreover, the imperative to appear ‘AI-ready’ frequently outpaces the prolonged, materially demanding work of cultivating research ecosystems. Together, these conditions produce structural precarity by compelling Global South universities/research institutions to demonstrate innovation within technological futures structured and governed by systems they do not control.

In such cases, international conferences, memoranda of understanding, innovation announcements and high-profile summits function as aspirational futurity that signal proximity to techno-modernity. They reassure funders, regulators and ranking bodies that the institution is not peripheral but competent in a terrain defined by acceleration.

The controversy around Galgotias University must be situated within this structural pressure. Expecting to be globally competitive without being structurally equal and performing readiness within a system that measures visibility more readily than to support capacity is problematic. It is symptomatic of a deeper institutional anxiety shaped by ranking metrics, global collaborations, funding dependencies, and the persistent threat of relevance-driven marginalisation.

Yet when the performance falters, or is perceived to falter, the backlash comes swiftly through media outrage and social media accelerates judgment. Perhaps the controversy offers an unintended lesson. It tells us that our performance of AI readiness is so indispensable and yet so fragile. It also tells us about our own entrenched habits of gendered judgment.

As Sara Ahmed, in her seminal book Living a Feminist Life wrote, “When you expose a problem, you pose a problem.” In this case, the woman became the problem because she revealed the fragility of the performativity. But we were quicker to ridicule her than to question the system. Moments like this are important because they insidiously linger in public imagination to unsettle the conditions under which women enter/inhabit public spaces. Until the reflex of personalising failure instead of interrogating the structure shifts, every debate risks ending up as another rehearsal of entrenched inequities. Ergo, innovation, no matter how futuristic in its vocabulary, will remain politically archaic if the cost is gendered scrutiny. 

Swarupa Deb is a human rights lawyer and sociologist.

Views expressed are personal