Harnessing the power of AI

Strong policy can drive innovation in sectors outside consumer goods and IT

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems that are able to perform tasks that normally requiring human intelligence. Examples of this are as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translation between languages. We rely on AI for many of our daily needs. But there are many who rely on AI to predict the science of future, including robotics. Siri, Google Now and Cortana are the first few examples.

There cannot be a better way to look at AI than analysing how technology made a mark in the success of e-commerce giant Flipkart and its leap in technological advancements. Very few know that Myntra was launched a few months before Flipkart and even secured funding almost a year before Flipkart. However, Flipkart has invested a lot of technology in getting their website discovered, by using various SEO techniques.

One of the key reasons was probably data driven, to understand user behaviour at a deeper level so that they could give good competition to market leaders. Had this gone their way, they could have predicted user behaviour. Serving users with better choices make them more loyal to the brand and that is something that even market leaders couldn’t have disrupted. However, this could also backfire because of the perception of taking away the user’s free will.

A similar case of using technology in the current scenario can be found in case of Paytm and other start-ups. The point here is that any start-ups leveraging technology will supersede over its competitors, including Google which has become a household name. You might be wondering why start-ups aren’t working more on AI. However, most start-ups are missing the key point, which is that they should be working on integrating AI with business and technology to provide incomparable experiences, rather than working on the core of AI.

While some Indian start-ups are starting to open to the idea of AI and its incorporation, still there is a lot to be done here. Fresh progress in AI is a wake-up call to policymakers. Spurring AI-based innovation and establishing AI-ready infrastructure are thus crucial to preparing India’s jobs and skills markets for an AI-based future and to safeguard its tactical interests.

The challenges facing India’s AI development are: AI-based applications to date have been motivated mostly by the private sector and have been dedicated primarily in consumer goods; early lessons of AI success globally offer public and private backing models for research that India should deliberate; the successive system of tutelage and work is outdated in today's economic atmosphere as the nature of jobs shifts quickly and skills become cherished and superseded.

For India to stupendously benefit from the AI revolution, it must accept a thoughtful policy to drive AI innovation, adaptation, and proliferation in sectors outside consumer goods and information technology services. Policymakers should make AI a critical element of the PM’s Make in India, Skill India and Digital India programmes by offering incentives for manufacturers, generating local innovation groups for manufacturing automation and robotics in partnership with universities and start-ups, integrating market-based mechanisms for classifying the kind of skills that establishments will value, and encouraging cloud infrastructure capacity building inside India.

The Indian National Education Policy essentially makes radical approvals on alternative models of education that would be better suited to an AI-powered economy. The government should recognise public sector applications like spotting tax fraud, averting subsidy leakage and targeting beneficiaries, where advances in AI could make a substantial influence.