HTLS 2026 LIVE: Consumption has skyrocketed across in India in 10 years, says Noel Tata

Tata Trusts Chairman Noel N Tata, speaking at the HT Leadership Summit 2026, mentioned Westside and how Tata became the first D2C business in India.

He said, “When we launched Westside – we took the more difficult decision. We said we will do private label which entails that you have to design the product yourself. It’s your own brand. And therefore, we really became the first D2C business in India where we went all the way from fabric and we own the chain all the way to sending to our customers, where we had to live or die by the product that we put on the shelves. And it took us a while to get going. But we started and it was interesting that in the first few years we thought maybe a format like that just cannot coexist in India. Ten years later we thought 50, 60 stores, maybe India can take.”

At the HT Leadership Summit 2026, Noel Tata said that in the last ten years, consumption has skyrocketed across India, across different socio-economic categories.

“But in the last ten years, consumption has just skyrocketed in India across different socio-economic categories to the point that today we are 320 odd stores and we are looking to see when we can reach 500 plus stores of Westside. So while we the team has done a fantastic job in addressing the opportunity, I think full credit has to go to the economy, to India, the way consumption is growing is incredible. It’s growing across markets, right? There is no divide,” Noel Tata said.

At the HT Leadership Summit 2026, Noel Tata spoke about retail. He said Trent was really a pioneer in retail when Tata first started its store.

“There were only two other shops of significance in India. In fact, one of the shareholders asked us, ‘Are you going to sell cutpiece?’ And when we opened our first store, there was a lot of curiosity about retail in India,” Noel Tata said.

For the fourth session, Tata Trusts Chairman Noel N Tata is in conversation with Suhel Seth, Managing Partner, Counselage India.

Today’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which learn by imitating humans, may also be picking up the human instinct for “self-preservation”, AI pioneer Stuart Russell said on Saturday at the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit

UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell, speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, said that China has stricter regulations on artificial intelligence in comparison to the US and Europe.

“We need international standards not just national standards. Many countries led by Norway and Finland issued a statement saying we need to have mandatory pre-release testing that if you fail, should not be allowed to release,” he said.

Stuart Russell, Director, Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, and Professor, UC Berkeley, in a conversation with Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV Partners at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026, flagged the recent cases of artificial intelligence’s ‘loss of control’ events.

“OpenAI chats went rogue and took control of a large part of the company as well, with the Hugging Face incident,” he said.

“We are seeing these loss-of-control events occurring so far in cyberspace. But these could easily occur in financial markets,” he added.

These systems can do whatever we can do, so there may not be a third sector for humans in which they can work to create economic value, said UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell.

“Assuming that the control problem is solved, the example is the mathematics problem which OpenAI shared. These are problems that mathematicians had been working on for many years, and one OpenAI system solved 400 of these in one day,” he said.

He added, “Our civilisation is made of intelligence and if we have access to more intelligence, we can have a better civilisation.”

The artificial intelligence (AI) systems have objectives of their own and one cannot understand how they function, AI safety expert and UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell said at the HT Leadership Summit 2026.

“We do not know how to tackle any misbehaviours. But AI systems do go along with human misbehaviours. If we ask them to carry out a cyberattack they would. We are digging our own graves,” he said.

UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell, speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026, said that “we might be one to four years away” from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), citing estimates.

UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell said that the definition that the field has “generally adopted is that AGI means that the system matches or exceeds human capability in all aspects and dimensions.”

‘But actually, there are multiple different functional meanings of AGI One is – can it do what humans can do and take over human work. and that matters its you are an economist, government official,” he said.

He added, “Another functional meaning – is it smart enough to take over the world. and for these two it might not need to be superhuman in every aspect.”

Artificial intelligence is a field of study and an attempt to understand intelligence well enough to create it a machine, said Stuart Russell, Director, Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, and Professor, UC Berkeley, in a conversation with Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV Partners at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026.

“And that’s how we’ve been thinking about it since the 1940s, when the field of artificial intelligence really began,” he said.

Economist Joseph E Stiglitz listed artificial intelligence (AI), climate change and inequalities as the “big risks” that need to be managed.

“Inequalities will fuel a migration crisis and create more pressure, and we, as a global community, will have to address and combat these inequalities,” he said at the HT Leadership Summit 2026.

He added, “There has been a sharp growth of right-wing extremism in males under 35. Women of that same age group have remained more socially conscious and have not gone into that rabbit hole of dysfunctionality, and so the young women give me hope, but the young men I worry about.”

“I cannot imagine being married to someone who has that difference in ideology. Marriage cannot happen if one person is a MAGA person and the other is a moderate. And I worry that if women are marrying a man who is more MAGA, then what kind of world are we setting into.”

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz was asked how a country like India will manage to keep its economic momentum in the face of the changing world.

“It is going to be hard. It will not be easy, and the way I tend to think about it is that economists think about demand and supply. On the supply side, I think that it will be important to manage the climate, and it will have very big effects,” he said.

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz was asked whether financial repression can be expected in response to the ongoing fiscal crisis.

He said, “The US has argued that it is working towards a world that has no borders, but that is a fantasy. The war has affected China, India, and other countries. And we are now at a stage where borders are very important to countries, and this was seen during the COVID pandemic.”

“For national economic sovereignty, one also needs to think of capital control. The US may not be able to do it, but emerging markets and countries may do,” he added.

“In India, this may be to encourage more investments. In Brazil, during its elections, this was reflected in Wall Street, which expected Lula to be defeated. But Brazilians said, “We should choose who the next president is and not Wall Street,” Stiglitz said.

Speaking at the HT Leadership Summit, Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz said that artificial intelligence has the potential for superabundance, in which people are increasingly productive, and that it is a good thing in principle.

“It could help make our cities more livable, less polluted, and manage the green transition; the demand for more labour will go down. It’s all great news if we can manage it,” he added.

He said that the agenda for this means that if you have all these investments in what the public needs, the investments may be carried out by private companies. But you need government funding to make the transition, Stiglitz added.

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, speaking at the HT Leadership Summit 2026, talked about whether larger economies are headed for a fiscal cliff and what it means for other countries like India.

He said that the US is reaching a debt-to-GDP ratio it has not seen since World War II, and that, during that time, the debt made sense. However, the current debt lacks justification, Stiglitz added.

Speaking about taxing the rich, Stiglitz said that people like Mark Zuckerberg manage to pay lower taxes than others in society despite their high incomes and profits. “If the rich were to pay their fair share, the US would not face a fiscal cliff,” he said, adding that even if the US faces one, it is because of its own decision not to impose taxes on the rich and billionaires.

In Europe, Stiglitz said there is a more legalistic structure which makes it difficult to respond.

“For India, there would be higher interest rates, and that would make it more difficult for countries that have been importing capital. The response is to generate more domestic savings,” the economist said.

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, speaking at the HT Leadership Summit 2026, said that India should be worried about artificial intelligence.

He was asked why AI taking over jobs is important for India and whether the nation has more breathing space before it is hit by this wave.

“India should be worried. If you look at where AI has had the most impact, it has been in the tech sector. It’s an irony that AI became very good at becoming coders, and hence replacing people at jobs,” he added.

Stiglitz said, however, the main question is how one pivots from this. “The key difference between the US and India is that the US could tax the winners of AI, profits at companies and use that to support a ‘progressive AI agenda’ by sustaining society, making investments in people,” he added.

“But across the border, where the winners are in the US, that type of redistribution will not be occurring. That means you need to think more strategically about where you are placed in the global economy,” Stiglitz said.

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz said that the advertising of artificial intelligence is very dangerous. “We are making a product that is very dangerous and will kill you all,” he said.

“Either AI is going to have the cure for cancer, or it will kill us all,” he added.

Stiglitz recalled what his friends in the Silicon Valley told him about not using sunscreen. He said they told him that “if AI is going to kill us all, we might as well live to enjoy the Sun.”

Speaking about artificial intelligence at the HT Leadership Summit 2026, Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz said that the AI bubble is a bubble. “It will break and have very big consequences, with some links to the US economy and its push for big data centres,” he added.

“The AI bubble is not sustainable. There needs to be,” he said.

Stiglitz said that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which came 2-3 years ago, have largely caught up. Further, he said that DeepSeek has not quite caught up with the current situation.

He also stated that there are many American companies that are joining the AI push by using Chinese models, such as DeepSeek, to train their model. This is because Chinese models are cheap, Stiglitz added.

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz said that an agreement with US President Donald Trump is not worth the paper it is written on. Speaking about the size of the European economy, Stiglitz said that the EU is larger, but the US’ trade is larger.

“Ideally, Europe should have won, but since it was fractured and Trump came in as a boy, he ‘beats them up one by one,” he added.

Stiglitz said that manufacturing is down in the US. “He (Trump) does not understand what needs to be done. Taxing coffee will not help and make the US grow coffee; we don’t have the weather for it.”

Speaking about trade deals with the US, Stiglitz cited the example of the US-Europe deal, saying that Trump raised issues about digitisation after the agreement was signed.

Speaking at the HT Leadership Summit 2026, Dr Joseph E. Stiglitz responded to a question about China’s rise. He said that China has developed on the basis of its status as a manufacturing power.

“China has grown so much in the last 30 years. No one would have thought it would become such a strong competitor to the United States,” he added.

However, Stiglitz said that China has to change its economic model. “It needs to move to more domestic and generic demands, such as healthcare, creating livable cities, etc. China has found it difficult to adapt,” he added.

Dr Joseph E. Stiglitz, speaking at HT Leadership Summit 2026, said that today we are moving towards a multipolar world. He said the most striking milestone occurred a decade ago, when China’s GDP, measured in PPP terms, exceeded that of the US.

Neither the US nor China advertised this, he said.

“The US did not want to say it became number two in the world, not the American style. China also, at that moment, did not want to say it was number one,” he added.

“Since then, China’s growth has closed the gap with the US. It is very difficult for the US to accept that it is no longer the largest economy. It is now much smaller in manufacturing, among other things,” Stiglitz added.

Dr Joseph E. Stiglitz, Economist and Professor, Columbia University, speaks at the HT Leadership Summit 2026. He is in conversation with Dr Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Executive Director, Artha Global.

Speaking on artificial intelligence, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that AI is much more complicated than questions about who has the chips, who has the energy, and who has the computers.

“India was late to AI but has embraced it in the past decade. We are a far more digitised society than many developed economies. A lot of it depends on how people built it into their lives and how they use it,” he added.