The 9th edition of Digital India Dialogues, also known as ‘AI pe Charcha’, was organised on 28th October on the topic ‘AI for Data Driven Governance’. As a part of this series, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) invites global and domestic leaders in AI to share their insights with the participants including government officials from the central and state governments as well as the general public. This monthly series has been conceptualised following the roaring success of the RAISE 2020 global summit.

I had the great privilege to moderate this month’s session which was convened by Mr Abhishek Singh, President & CEO of NeGD; MD & CEO Digital India, CEO of MyGov. The knowledge partner was the global software company SAP, represented by Dr Martin Klein, Global General Manager, Public Services, and Mr Rahul Lodhe, Senior Director, Engineering, and Head, SAP Artificial Intelligence India.

In his opening address, Mr Abhishek Singh welcomed the guest speakers as well as the attendees to the event. “AI pe Charcha events focus on building awareness amongst government entities at both the central government level and state government level, as also exposing use cases which can be replicated and thought of being implemented at various levels in the government.” Since we are increasingly seeing applications AI in the field of healthcare, education, agriculture, skilling and manufacturing, Mr Singh said that we need to scale up these solutions and ensure that they become more ubiquitous and are utilised by a greater number of people. It is with the rationale of such capacity building in AI that MeitY has been partnering with the industry and government allies to organise such sessions, he explained.

Dr Martin Klein delivered a keynote on “AI for Public Sector: Creating a Digitally Intelligent India”. By sharing examples of use cases that his company has implemented with other governments across the globe, Dr Klein made a strong case for India to follow an overall data-driven governance approach for improving citizen services. His presentation also explained how SAP delivers AI to their customers. He touched upon successful AI implementations in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Queensland Office of State Revenue, Government of Arkansas, and a European state. 

The second speaker, Mr Rahul Lodhe demonstrated some possibilities with AI for data-driven governance during his presentation. He credited the Prime Minister for being a visionary leader who understands the potential of intelligent technologies and encourages their growth and use in the government. He shared the achievements of SAP Labs India during the COVID-19 crisis in developing a predictive simulation model for the disease (in collaboration with IISc and ITFR) and an ML-driven resource optimisation strategy for logistic support for the Government of Karnataka. Shifting focus to Enterprise AI, Mr Lodhe explained the possibilities offered by SAP to their clients. What stood out in his presentation, however, were the practical demonstrations of some successful SAP applications, such as ML-driven Intelligent company reconciliation and Document Extraction using AI.

At the end of the presentations, participants showed great vigour in interacting with the panellists through their questions, all of which were brilliantly answered by the experts. The session was streamed live on the social media channels of Digital India, Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), and INDIAai.

• Watch the full session here

Photo by Still Pixels from Pexels