2024 Ahoy! Putting AI To Work For India

The innovations made in the last couple of years have seen the emergence of AI systems powered by foundation models that extend beyond natural language processing, making scalable AI for business a reality. Putting AI to work for India presents an opportunity to tackle every scenario we have faced in recent times – creating vaccines faster, predicting climate change, untangling supply chain bottlenecks to prevent food shortages, reducing financial fraud and much more. However, using AI for nation building will require engendering trust in the technology, without which the scale needed to make a significant impact equitably will remain a pipe dream.

Therefore in 2024, we will need to take the next step in accelerating AI adoption by tackling the trust issue. This involves integrating guardrails throughout the AI lifecycle and governance at the organisational level to ensure that AI is explainable, transparent and fair. Achieving this requires a twofold approach – government regulation and corporate accountability.

Getting AI Governance Right, Now

Put simply, AI models learn patterns from data to generate an output – which means, to govern AI models, we need to first focus on governing the data they are trained on. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Bill is a great step towards formulating policy that fosters data governance and will ensure Indian businesses think about the origin, sensitivity, and lifecycle of all the data that they use.

It’s not a case of whether you regulate but where you regulate. We should not stifle innovation in our effort to regulate, and hence, a risk-based approach is the best way to go. Consider the case of a retail chatbot giving you suggestions on what outfit best suits an occasion versus a medical AI system suggesting drug dosage – it’s easy to figure out which scenario has a higher risk to the user and requires more scrutiny in regulation.

As for corporate accountability, there are three areas that should be addressed by every organisation planning to use AI. First is the provenance of data ensuring that the right data was used, where it originated, how it has evolved, and identifying any discrepancies. Next would be the explainability of models to always know why and how AI decisions were made. Finally, reducing bias when training AI models to make it inclusive across various dimensions of diversity, which is important for a demographically diverse country like India.

Being Atmanirbhar With AI

Upon establishing trust in AI, as we move beyond 2024, we will see operationalised AI models becoming routine in public and private enterprises. In the next 4-5 years, it will become 10x faster and cheaper to tune domain-specific AI models making it universally accessible and applicable. What’s expected to come points towards a significant impact across the board – i.e., the future of everything. Here are just some ways in which that will happen.

Accelerating the economy and citizen services with AI: Until now, deploying AI at an enterprise scale required significant investment in resources and skill – something that only a small percentage of large enterprises could afford. However, with AI powered by foundation models democratizing its use and becoming more energy- and cost-efficient, not just large enterprises, but even SMEs (including startups) and government agencies, will be able to reap transformational benefits.

Fight fire with fire: As India continues to digitise, we are exposed to even more sophisticated cyberattacks, an expanding attack surface, and a lack of adequate skilled security experts. The average cost of a data breach in India reached ₹17.9 crore in 2023 – an all-time high and almost a 28% increase since 2020. Fortunately, AI-powered tools can accelerate and automate threat detection and response, augmenting the capabilities of security teams so less can do more. For example, generative AI will speed up security processes that are tasking. By analysing vast amounts of data and recognising anomalies—generative AI can spot threats as quickly as they materialise.

The multiplier in job creation: Let’s acknowledge that all this digitisation will impact our workforce. The World Economic Forum predicts that new technologies will disrupt 85 million jobs globally between 2020 and 2025, however, it will also create 97 million new job roles. There is a new division of labour being created between human workers and machines – one I believe will significantly augment human capabilities with the right opportunities to reskill. For instance, AI-assisted code development put directly into the hands of developers can increase productivity and, on a macro scale address skills gaps. Similarly, it has potential for any number of professions like doctors, government officials, scientists, teachers, etc.

India’s golden demographics and rapidly growing technical talent pool have provided us with a tremendous opportunity to lead the AI revolution. I am excited for 2024, knowing that we have the expertise, infrastructure and investment from both public and private sectors to contribute towards achieving the milestones set before us and writing the next chapter of our country’s digital transformation journey.