IBM conducts AI Day, India poised to lead AI revolution

IBM hosted its AI Day to reinforce IBM’s commitment to helping clients leverage the power of AI and Automation in the new world. Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia, inaugurated the event, where he was joined by Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, Technology, IBM India/ South Asia to drive conversations on how IBM’s AI approach and offerings are creating opportunities for the economy, businesses, and societies in India.

As part of AI Day, Rahul Deshpande, Global Practice Delivery Head and Business Solutions Head for AI Solutions Practice, discussed ‘Unlocking Business Drivers for AI Adoption’ at a Fireside Chat with Siddhesh Naik, Country Leader, Data, AI & Automation software, Technology Sales, IBM India/South Asia. The event also featured discussions on technology trends that will power India's AI Charter in 2023.

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/ South Asia said, “As digitization in India continues to deepen, companies are eager to deploy AI and automation capabilities at scale to drive innovation and competitiveness. As one of the fastest-growing economies, the world’s largest community of developers and a large start-up ecosystem, India is well poised to lead the AI revolution and establish itself as an AI innovation garage of the world.”

Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, Technology, IBM India/ South Asia said, “AI has truly come into its own in the past few years, especially with self-driving cars, chatbots, and digital assistants. A robust ecosystem for AI is being built in India, and it is a matter of pride to be part of this revolution. When deployed appropriately, AI and Automation can transform government services, education, healthcare, and business interactions with customers in the upcoming techade. AI will scale and move from an operational 'benefit' to an essential element in business growth and modernization. I am excited to see how India@100 could serve as a global laboratory for developing AI technologies in India, for India and the world.”

While the pandemic has brought uncertainty to all facets of society, one thing is certain: the importance of technology in daily life has never been greater. Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has helped businesses ease the strain of workforce dislocation, supply chain challenges, IT incidents, customer service interruptions, etc. That is why AI adoption is steadily on the rise. According to IBM’s Global AI Adoption Index 2022, 57% of IT professionals in India report that their organization has actively deployed AI in their business, and over a quarter (27%) indicate that their organization is exploring the use of AI. Going into 2023, there are 7 key areas where we’ll see AI adoption accelerate, leading to more meaningful applications in different industries.

AI Powered Intelligent Automation: With the right AI Powered Automation processes and team in place, intelligent automation will optimize business and IT processes across all industries and combat the growing skills gap to create a deeper focus on higher value work.

Rise of Cyber Assistants: Skilled AI systems or Cyber Assistants are adept at identifying abnormal behaviours, assessing vulnerabilities dynamically and flagging anomalous activity that can indicate new threats. AI will also improve its knowledge over time to better understand cybersecurity threats and cyber risk by consuming billions of data artifacts.

Creating Reusable AI through Foundation Models: The next wave in AI, called foundation models, will replace the task-specific models that have dominated the AI landscape to date by introducing systems that are trained on a broad set of unlabeled data and can be used and re-used for different tasks, with minimal fine-tuning.

Synthetic Data: Data (e.g., financial information, healthcare records and consumer analysis) come with significant hurdles such as privacy, ethics, and copyright laws. Data these days is also often expensive and comes with baked-in vulnerabilities like bias. Synthetic data will offer a work-around because they are computer-generated examples that can augment or replace real data to speed up the training of AI models, protect sensitive data, improve accuracy, or find and mitigate bias and security weaknesses.

Energizing a Carbon-Neutral Future: Today, environmental risks are business risks, but technology can help companies mitigate them by deploying strategies that decarbonize and digitize businesses across industries. By applying AI technology, companies will establish more transparent, traceable, and decarbonized supply chains. AI and automation will help organizations to collect data, identify risk, validate documentation, and provide audit trails, even in high inflationary periods, while also managing their carbon, waste, energy, water consumption and material utility.

Personalization in Multiple Dimensions: In 2023, AI will continue its impact on the consumer care journey with more personalized and fully realized interactions. Conversational AI with expressions and emotions along with the voice of choice will bring in the personalization needed for making digital transformation possible.

Trustworthy AI implemented at Enterprise Scale: According to IBM’s Global AI Adoption Index 2022, four out of five businesses believe it is important to be able to describe how their AI made a decision. As organizations continue to leverage AI to improve processes, there will be an increased focus on trust, transparency, and governance of AI systems to realize it’s true potential. Unboxing data to do meaningful EDA (Exploratory data analysis) coupled with platforms to identify bias, data quality and explainability in order to inform customers and regulatory bodies about how specific decisions were made and what factors will change those decisions.

For India to achieve its $5 trillion GDP target by FY27, businesses must draw a significant correlation between AI maturity and its growth trajectory. As the country moves forward on its economic growth path, further enhancing data and AI capabilities at scale are critical. This revolution will not only boost industrial productivity but also transform India's socio-economic situation, powering India’s digital dream.