Democratising AI in India: Experts unpack ‘AI for all’ models at ET Soonicorns Summit 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not “a passing fad” but a transformative force, a lasting influence, and a catalyst for change, and its most profound impact will manifest in the long term, the panellists maintained at a curated closed-door roundtable conversation held at the ET Soonicorns Summit 2024 in Bengaluru.

The panellists outlined the impact AI is poised to have on sectors such as education, healthcare, transportation, retail, and more even as they underscored the challenges that India needs to overcome to unlock this technology’s full potential.

“I think it is pretty clear that it is not just a passing fad or a wave that will disappear,” said Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-founder of Scaler and Interviewbit, adding, “It is here, and it is here for good.”

Saxena was part of a roundtable discussion, titled ‘AI for All in India: Leveraging AI Across Sectors and Its Limitless Possibilities,’ along with Vinay Rai, Executive Vice President (Engineering) at Netradyne; Ramesh Kumar Katreddi, Vice President (Engineering) at Jumbotail; Vaibhav Khandelwal, Co-founder and CTO at Shadowfax; and Sarang Sharma, Product Head at Practo. Together, these experts addressed the underlying questions: Is ‘AI for all’ a reality or a distant vision? What will it take to bring AI to every corner of India, and impact the life of every Indian? They dissected the topic in great depth and detail, bringing out a few fascinating insights into the challenges of driving inclusive innovation and the possible solutions to make AI accessible across India.

The session was moderated by Nirmal John, Senior Editor at Economic Times. This closed-door conversation was held at the third edition of the ET Soonicorns Summit in Bengaluru. The revamped summit brought together industry leaders, founders, decision-makers, and thought leaders to outline forward-looking strategies for the Indian startup ecosystem.

Beyond the buzz: A realistic assessment of AI
Rai asserted that he was in complete agreement with Saxena on this. “I am 100% in agreement with Abhimanyu, it is definitely not a passing fad,” he said. Rai added that every technology, however, undergoes a certain cycle. “There is a lot of hype when a new technology emerges. We tend to overestimate the impact it can have in the short term, and underestimate its long-term impact,” he maintained. “I believe that AI is going to be there, definitely,” he added. He said that generative (Gen) AI, particularly, is in that phase right now where stakeholders are expecting a lot of things to get solved overnight. “It is not going to happen in my view, but if you stretch your timelines a bit, the impact is going to be immense,” Rai explained.
The game-changer
With all the panellists agreeing on the longevity and the profound impact artificial intelligence is going to have over the years, they moved on to discussing sectors wherein AI is going to be a game-changer.

• Democratising education: Personalised learning experiences, that have traditionally and historically been available to people with resources and means, have now been thrown open to everybody regardless of the social strata they come from.

“Getting private tutors, who specialised in a particular field, for their kids, was something the rich could only afford. Now AI gives us the capability, and we are already building hyper-personalised solutions,” Saxena said and emphasised the importance of this by saying that, “access to quality education is the root of growth of a society.”

• Enhancing safety and utility: AI is already making a difference in enhancing safety, and it is poised to do more in this domain. Presently, the technology being used in road safety, where AI-based monitoring helps prevent road accidents, is one of the practical examples of its application. Simultaneously, it is being integrated into other everyday products and services to improve safety.

“Netradyne is a specific example, where we are into road safety. We have been using AI for the last nine to ten years to make roads safer. And clearly, it has been good for everyone,” Rai said.

• Revolutionising location infrastructure for seamless logistics: This particular potential of AI is akin to what UPI did to digital payments in India. With the potential to streamline logistics, AI can map complex addresses and make deliveries more efficient.

“In our country, we face an inconsistency in location infrastructure. We may be staying in a PIN code X, but a neighbouring city might have an entirely different PIN code. These fundamental problems create a disparity in navigating locations,” Khandelwal said. “AI is capable and can be leveraged in deciphering underlying patterns and historical data to better navigate those addresses and build a better mapping layer,” he elaborated.

• Hyper-personalisation: AI has hyper-personalisation capabilities and this can help customise user experiences down to individual preferences and behaviours. The costs are decreasing and accessibility is growing exponentially, which will allow companies to adopt AI for better customer experiences.

“Previously, there were two caps—expertise and cost. Both have kept coming down and that is changing the overall landscape,” Katreddi of Jumbotail said, adding, “Every product will now try to tune its behaviour towards the user and their needs as well as their behaviours,”

However, the question remains: How to make AI work for all? The path to realising the ultimate potential and “limitless possibilities” of AI is surely not a smooth one as hurdles remain. The panellists diligently mapped out the challenges India has stacked up in the realm of AI.

Taking AI to the grassroots
In India, the influence of AI is presently concentrated in urban areas, in various facets of life including social media, emails, photography, and more. Concerted efforts are required to take AI to all societal layers, including rural areas, and in all spheres of life.

“It has the potential, and the potential needs to be explored,” Sharma said. “AI has been around for quite some time and has already impacted a lot of people. The next step should be to start revolutionising the lives of people with a rural background,” he added.

Sharma emphasised that any technology reaches its full potential only after it significantly improves life across social strata, for all kinds of people. “There are very few technologies in history that have reached that level. AI, I think, has some way to go till it reaches that kind of a point. But the potential is there, a lot, and we are just getting started,” he elucidated.

The cost barrier
While wide-scale implementation is necessary to realise AI’s potential, there is a cost barrier to it. India is a price-sensitive market and the cost barrier is definitely an impediment to the wide-scale implementation of AI.

However, the panellists felt that the costs are going to decrease as time progresses.

“But as of today, most AI solutions are pretty costly. Even if I talk about, say, the kind of computing power that is required to generate responses, it is not trivial,” Saxena emphasised.

He said that there was hope that the cost would keep reducing every six to twelve months, making AI more accessible. “Let us see how far that goes. But I think in a country like India, all these solutions being very political is the key,” he said.

Rai added that practical solutions that solve real-world problems, albeit economically, are necessary for a meaningful impact, especially in cost-sensitive sectors like transportation and logistics where autonomous solutions may be too expensive.

“The idea for any business is to build and use technology to solve real-life problems. But all this has to come in an economical way, to further the agenda and for better implementation,” Rai said.

Mitigate fears of job loss, prepare the workforce
Traditionally, every technology has come with fears that humans are going to be rendered jobless with the automation it brings in. With artificial intelligence, the fears have been all the more widespread, and in some ways believable.

Khandelwal of Shadowfax maintained that the workforce needs to be prepared for the future with AI. He said that curriculum updates, early AI exposure, and vocational training can prepare the workforce for future AI-driven changes, which will help mitigate the fears of AI-driven job losses.

“The idea is to equip the newer generation with relevant skills,” Khandelwal said, “Fundamentally if our vocational training and curriculum can be structured in that way, the new kinds of jobs that would arise if the medium tasks are automated, then such apprehensions will be lesser,” he explained.

He said that, maybe, academia and the government can work together in this regard. “This scenario emerged when computers were first introduced. Then we included computer training in our curriculum and the fears vanished as parents started to look for schools imparting computer education. This kind of policy will definitely help us take AI in the right direction in our country,” Khandelwal explained.

Research and innovation are another aspect of mitigating this challenge, the panellists felt. They emphasised fostering domestic research and innovation in India to lessen the reliance on external solutions.

Saxena said that there is a need for collaboration between industry, government, and academia to take AI implementation further in our country.

“There should be more research happening in the universities, in my opinion. A deeper collaboration with the industry and academia to do very applied research, which can also hold itself accountable for the kind of impact and outcome,” Saxena said.

He said that brain power can come from academia, and grants can come from the government. “The industry can at least guide them by providing them with inputs on the real problems that exist in the industry,” Saxena said, as he was addressing Kahndelwal’s fears about putting the burden on companies with dismal R&D budgets, who will always be biased towards solving their business problems.

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