When 60,000 Students Gather to Build the Future: What AI Fest 2026 Says About Us

There's a three-day window this February in Punjab where something unusual is happening. Sixty thousand students will converge on Chandigarh University—not for exams, not for placements, but to build, pitch, and debate the shape of artificial intelligence in India. AI Fest 2026 (www.aifest.inc) , they're calling it. And while events come and go, this one feels different in timing, in scale, and in what it might quietly reveal about a generation's relationship with technology.
I keep thinking about that number. Sixty thousand. That's not a conference. That's a small city reassembling itself around a single question: what happens when AI stops being something we read about and becomes something we make?
The Shift Nobody's Quite Naming
Somewhere between the ChatGPT moment of 2022 and now, something changed in how young Indians engage with AI. It stopped being theoretical. You can see it in the way engineering students talk about their final year projects—no longer "a website for local businesses" but "an AI agent that automates inventory for kirana stores." You can hear it in MBA students pivoting their case studies toward machine learning models for credit scoring in Tier-3 cities.
AI Fest isn't creating this shift. It's reflecting it.
The event spans three days, each with its own flavor. Day one, they're calling InnovFest—a showcase of pan-India competitions across sectors. Day two becomes SANDBOX, where ideas meet investors and founders sit across from those with capital. Day three crescendos into Campus Tank's grand finale, with pitches, product launches, and what they're billing as "unfiltered sessions with celebrities."
But strip away the marketing speak, and you find something more interesting: a structure that mirrors how AI itself is being built in India right now. Not in isolated labs, not in Silicon Valley clones, but in this messy, energetic collision of students who code, startups hunting for their first check, and policymakers trying to write rules for technology that's evolving faster than legislation ever could.
The Geography of Ambition
There's something deliberate about hosting this in Chandigarh. Not Bangalore with its venture capital ecosystem. Not Delhi with its proximity to power. Chandigarh—a planned city, yes, but also a university town in Punjab where agriculture still shapes the economy, where many students are first-generation college attendees, where the median family income looks very different from India's metro bubbles.
When you position a national AI gathering here, you're making a statement about access. You're suggesting that the future of Indian AI won't just be built by IIT grads who intern at FAANG companies. It'll be built by someone's daughter in Ludhiana who taught herself Python during lockdown. By a team from a tier-2 engineering college that figured out how to use computer vision to detect crop diseases.
The event promises 300+ AI startups in showcase mode, with 100+ of them pitching for a share of a $6 million funding pool. That's not charity money. That's real capital looking for real returns, but it's being deployed in a space where the next breakthrough might come from someone without a Stanford degree or a family office backing them.
Four Narratives, One Conversation
The organizers have structured the event around four core themes, and reading through them feels like watching someone try to hold several truths about AI at once.
The first theme—"Evolving AI with Evolving Humans"—pushes back against the displacement narrative. The idea that AI augments rather than replaces, that it becomes "a beacon of human evolution." It's optimistic, maybe necessarily so when you're addressing 60,000 young people whose careers will be shaped by these tools.
Then immediately, the second theme pivots to "Ethics, Trust & Governance." As if to say: yes, we're building this, but we're also terrified of building it wrong. Panels with policymakers and legal experts sit alongside startup pitches. The juxtaposition is jarring until you realize it's exactly right. You can't separate the building from the governing, not anymore.
The third theme, "AI-Engineered Reality," is where rubber meets road—healthcare, finance, smart cities, the unglamorous work of making AI function in the real world. And finally, "Technical Frontiers" dives into the backend: agents, platforms, no-code systems, the infrastructure that makes the magic possible.
Taken together, these themes don't resolve into a single vision. They sit in tension with each other, which feels honest. We don't know yet whether AI will be a beacon or a disruption, whether governance will enable innovation or stifle it, whether the reality we engineer will be equitable or extractive.
But sixty thousand people showing up suggests they want to be part of figuring it out.
What SANDBOX Actually Means
Day two's SANDBOX concept is worth lingering on. The name alone—a place to experiment, to build without consequences, to fail safely—signals something about how young builders are thinking about AI. Not as a finished product to deploy but as a space to explore.
The program includes "deep-dive conversations, founder-investor interactions, creator roundtables, mentorship-driven sessions." It's launching a Medical Cohort and a Media Cohort. What strikes me is the discipline-specificity. Not just "build AI tools" but "build AI tools for healthcare" or "for media."
This is where the Indian approach to AI might diverge from the Western template. We're not starting with general intelligence or philosophical questions about consciousness. We're starting with problems. Can AI help a doctor in a district hospital diagnose TB faster? Can it help a regional journalist fact-check in real-time? The pragmatism is almost aggressive.
The Campus Tank Equation
Campus Tank—the startup competition woven through the event—represents something I haven't quite seen before. It's framed as Season 2, which means this isn't a first attempt. There's iteration happening, learning from what worked last year, refining the pitch process, expanding the funding pool.
But what's interesting is the coupling of Campus Tank with initiatives like "Zero to One" (which apparently launched 40+ MVPs) and "HackWithUttarPradesh" (80+ MVPs). These aren't just competitions. They're conveyor belts, moving students from idea to minimum viable product to pitch to funding.
The machinery of it matters. Because when you create repeatable systems for young people to go from "I have an idea" to "I have a prototype" to "I have funding," you're not just supporting individual startups. You're changing what feels possible. You're making the path visible.
What February 2026 Might Quietly Signal
When I think about what's happening in Chandigarh in a couple of weeks, I keep returning to a question: what does it mean when a generation doesn't wait for permission to build the future?
Not waiting for perfect AI regulation before experimenting. Not waiting for Silicon Valley to validate Indian innovations before scaling them. Not waiting for the "right" pedigree before pitching to investors.
There's an impatience to it, but also a sophistication. These aren't students naively building tools without considering consequences—the ethics track makes that clear. They're building and questioning, coding and debating governance, pitching and challenging the investor playbook.
Maybe that's the real story of AI Fest 2026. Not the specific startups that will win funding, not even the particular innovations that will emerge from three days of intensity. But the demonstration that young Indians are approaching AI neither as passive consumers nor as awed spectators.
They're approaching it as builders who understand they're building something incomplete, something that will need iteration, something that carries both promise and risk. And they're doing it anyway, together, in numbers large enough to matter.
Sixty thousand people don't gather for a trend. They gather for a transformation.
And perhaps that's what February 2026 signals most of all: the moment when AI in India stopped being about what might happen and started being about what we're making happen. Messily, imperfectly, urgently. Three days in Punjab where the future isn't predicted—it's prototyped.