Large-scale event management has always been a demanding undertaking. However, what transpired at the recent India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 16, 2026, is a particularly public and pointed reminder of just how demanding it truly is.
An important summit for India with massive expectations for growth and innovation in the Artificial Intelligence sector has turned into a manual for what event organizers must absolutely ‘not’ do. The registration system is said to have crashed repeatedly and digital payments sporadically unavailable due to bad or absent WiFi.
A founder also alleged that his startup’s wearable AI devices had gone missing from his booth during a security sweep. And by Tuesday morning, India’s Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw appeared at a press briefing and issued a public apology. That is a difficult sequence of events for any organising team, let alone one hosting a summit in celebration of artificial intelligence.
This blog is not a piece about pointing fingers. Organising a summit of this scale is genuinely hard work, but the challenges that surfaced on day one, however, were not unpredictable. Each of them maps directly onto a gap that modern event management automation is specifically built to close.
The Check-In Challenge and Why Long Queues Are Not Inevitable
Perhaps the most visible challenge on day one was the chaos at entry points. It is important to understand that long queues are not an unavoidable aspect of hosting large-scale events. They are completely manageable and are a direct result of manual, connectivity-dependent processes meeting peak-hour demand. They do disappear when event professionals install the right systems in place.
At the India AI Summit, even journalists had been forced to spend most of their time trying to figure out if they needed a digital QR code or a physical pass to gain entry to the event. The instructions were contradictory and nobody at the gate seemed to have a definitive answer. This is precisely the kind of challenge that automated check-in systems are built to eliminate. These codes carry embedded access permissions with no human judgment call required on the spot.
The Challenge of Handling Registrations
Few things damage the confidence of the organizing team faster in the early hours of a big event than the system meant to verify attendance simply ceasing to work. For delegates who have traveled internationally, a crashed registration system communicates that the organization is not in control of its own event.
This is a challenge that stems from infrastructure being under-prepared for real-world load. Registration platforms need to be stress-tested for concurrent access well before the event opens and they should be architected for scale at the outset. Cloud-based event management systems are built to handle sudden spikes in simultaneous requests, processing thousands of check-ins at the same moment without service interruption. Attendee load balancing, redundant servers and pre-event capacity testing are baseline requirements for a summit of this size rather than optional additions.
Automation also helps on the frontend. When registration workflows are automated end-to-end and cover things like ticket purchases, badge generation and even session bookings, there is almost zero scope for error. Attendees who complete registration automatically receive everything they need, including their QR code, their schedule, their access tier and clear instructions about what to bring. That last detail connects directly to the next challenge.
The Communication Loop Challenge
One attendee posted on X asking how anyone was supposed to attend the summit given the list of prohibited items that included bags, car keys and water bottles. The frustration behind that post is understandable, but it also points to a communication challenge that automation could have prevented entirely.
The security requirements for this summit were always going to be strict because the Prime Minister’s attendance made that certain from the outset. That information should have reached every delegate automatically and repeatedly in plain language, long before they arrived at the gate
Pre-event automated email and SMS sequences are a standard feature of modern event management platforms. In the weeks and days before an event, these sequences deliver attendees everything they need to know, covering venue maps, security guidelines, prohibited items, parking details and session schedules. The information goes out at timed intervals and gets reinforced closer to the event date, so it reaches attendees when it is most relevant to them.
Access Control and The Challenge Of Making Sure Exhibitors Can Reach Their Own Booths
Maitreya Wagh, co-founder of AI voice startup Bolna, posted on X to say he had been stranded outside the venue and could not reach his own exhibition booth. He was far from alone. When the main hall was cleared ahead of the Prime Minister’s arrival, exhibitors and startup founders who had paid to be there and had set up their equipment were swept up in a blanket security clearance with no distinction made between general delegates and booth holders.
This is an access control challenge and automated systems resolve it cleanly. Event management platforms assign role-specific credentials to every participant type, covering general delegates, media, exhibitors, sponsors, VIPs and speakers. Each role carries distinct access permissions enforced at entry points via QR scanning, so that an exhibitor’s designation or ID carries permissions allowing them into the exhibition hall during setup and throughout the event.
Tracking Exhibitor Equipment During Security Sweeps
The most alarming account of day one came from Dhananjay Yadav, founder of NeoSapiens, who alleged that his company’s wearable AI devices disappeared from their booth during the security sweep. He was instructed by security to leave the devices behind and was assured they would be safe. He returned hours later to find them gone. The challenge here was the complete absence of any system for logging or tracking exhibitor assets when the venue was cleared.
Event platforms with asset tracking capability allow exhibitors to register their equipment at setup so that items are logged against the exhibitor’s profile with timestamps and location data. If a security sweep requires a venue to be cleared, organizers already have a verified record of what was in the hall and who it belonged to.
This kind of accountability protects exhibitors and it also protects organizers because a clear digital trail of what was logged in, what security procedures were followed and what was logged out makes allegations of mismanagement far easier to investigate and resolve. The absence of such a system left both the exhibitor and the organizing team without any recourse or verifiable record and it turned an operational challenge into a public reputational one.
These Challenges Were Foreseeable and They Remain Solvable
Union Minister Vaishnaw’s public apology on Tuesday was gracious and the announcement of a war room to manage the remaining days of the summit was a sensible corrective step. But the harder point is that none of the challenges at the India AI Impact Summit were unforeseeable. Queue buildups, registration crashes, communication gaps, exhibitor access confusion, asset accountability failures and payment collapses are all known challenges for large-scale events and they are the exact problems event management software was built to solve.
India’s ambition in hosting the first AI summit in the Global South carries real weight. The country has the talent, the technology sector and the standing to make this series of summits a lasting institution. A summit dedicated to artificial intelligence carries an implicit message that its host understands how technology resolves real-world challenges at scale and the logistical stumbles of day one cut directly against that message.
The tools to avoid every one of these challenges already exist. With the help of an automated event management software like Dryfta, event professionals will be able to perform automated check-ins, possess role-based access control, go over pre-event communication sequences, build a scalable registration infrastructure and cashless payment systems as well as send real-time notifications to attendees. Dryfta gives organising teams the infrastructure to focus on what matters most: the event itself.