India, Feb. 20 -- It was meant to be an evening of policy, possibility and powerful conversations. Instead, it ended with a late-night room service tray.

Sara Hooker, the US-based CEO of Adaption Labs, had flown in to attend the high-profile AI Impact Summit dinner hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The gathering promised a curated guest list of global artificial intelligence leaders, policymakers and innovators - the kind of room where future collaborations are sketched between courses.

Caught in a massive traffic snarl in the national capital, the tech executive spent nearly four hours inching through clogged roads as security arrangements and heavy vehicular movement brought key stretches of the city to a near standstill. By the...