Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the Indian economy. In the last few years, India made significant progress in its adoption. However, there are several areas India need to focus on to make the most of what AI offers.

AI adoption and capacity building in India

• NITI Aayog’s national strategy for AI envisages ‘AI for all’ for inclusive growth.
• NITI Aayog identifies healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities and infrastructure, and smart mobility and transportation as focus areas for AI-led solutions for social impact.
• The Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra governments, among others, have announced policies and strategies for AI adoption.
• Technology companies have established AI centres of excellence to create solutions for global clients.
• India has a thriving AI start-up ecosystem.
• Our talent pool in AI/ML (Machine Learning) is fast-growing, with over 5,00,000 people working on these technologies at present.

AI will boost Indian economy

• Nasscom believes that data and AI will contribute $450 billion-$500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, which is around 10% of the government’s aspiration of a $5 trillion economy.
• The growing AI economy will create employment opportunity by creating an estimated over 20 million technical roles.
• AI can create not just niche solutions to specific problems that banks and other service providers are deploying, such as speeding up loan application processing or improving customer service; it can also provide solutions for better governance and social impact.
•  AI can create not just niche solutions to specific problems that banks and other service providers are deploying, such as speeding up loan application processing or improving customer service; it can also provide solutions for better governance and social impact.

Way forward: Focus on 3 areas

1)Talent development

• In 2019, we nearly doubled our AI workforce to 72,000 from 40,000 the year before.
• However, the demand continues to outpace the supply.
• That means our efforts to develop talent must pick up speed.

2) Policies around data

• Without data, there cannot be AI.
• However, we need a balanced approach in the way we harness and utilise data.
• We need a robust legal framework that governs data and serves as the base for the ethical use of AI.

3) Providing the right amount of training data

• Though the use of digital technologies has gone up, the level of digitisation continues to be low.
• This poses a big challenge for organisations in finding the right amount of training data to run AI/ML algorithms, which in turn affects the accuracy of the results.
• Then there is the problem of availability of clean datasets.
• Organisations need to invest in data management frameworks that will clean their data before they are analysed, thus vastly improving the outcomes of AI models.

Consider the question “What is Artificial Intelligence? How it could help in providing a boost to the India economy?”

Conclusion

The future for AI looks promising but to convert the potential into reality, India will need better strategies around talent development, stronger policies for data usage and governance, and more investments in creating a technology infrastructure that can truly leverage AI.

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