As we enter deep into the 21st century, Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more ingrained in our daily lives. From providing updated traffic directions to solving decades longs problems in science, AI has been established as the next great technological milestone in the history of human civilisation, with its impact spanning every aspect of our lives. According to numerous reports, the economic benefit AI brings to India in the coming years is significant, as it can add over $500 billion and almost 20 million jobs to the Indian economy by 2025. On a global scale, AI can generate around $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030 as AI impact build up at an accelerating pace over time.

To enable India's IT sector to benefit from AI transition NASSCOM’ launched its 'AI for India' mission. The ‘AI for India’ mission is underscored by four strategic pillars, one of which focuses on driving AI adoption in India. As part of this pillar, the annual NASSCOM AI Gamechanger program was launched early this year in partnership with Microsoft for recognising the most impactful AI implementations across the key sectors that are expected to create a tremendous impact on the Indian economy. This will further open a vast amount of opportunities for India’s AI entrepreneurs and inventors to submit their successful AI implementations across the key sectors that are expected to create a tremendous impact on the Indian economy. 

However, the wait is now over as the winners of the Gamechanger awards were announced at the NASSCOM Xperience AI Summit on August 7th. These winners were selected after a meticulous process with over 300 applicants this year. The program was led by the Steering Committee, which consisted of Abhishek Singh -President & CEO of NeGD, Rohini Srivathsa- National Technology Officer at Microsoft India, Srikanth Velamakanni- Group Chief Executive of Fractal Analytics, Leena Walawalkar -Chief Innovation Evangelist at TCS, and Rishikesha Krishnan - Director of IIM Bangalore. 

One of the key highlights of the AI Gamechanger awards was the strong presence of government projects with three of them being awarded as exemplars. These include the MyGov Corona Helpdesk Chatbot, e-Paarvai by the Tamil Nadu e-Governance division and Telangana State Government’s crowd monitoring system.

The MyGov Chatbot was launched a year ago to fight the widespread transmission of misinformation and provide accurate facts and advice on COVID -19. The team at MyGov created the Corona chatbot in just six days with the help of Haptik and WhatsApp and millions of Indians have been benefiting from this implementation. Read more here.

The e-Paarvai app was launched to overcome the shortage of ophthalmologists and to prevent permanent blindness in people caused as a result of cataracts, which can identify the presence of cataracts in a person’s eye. Read more here.

The Telangana police have successfully used the Crowd Estimation and Management tool effectively in the last year. It was used to manage crowds at India vs West Indies T20 match in Hyderabad in 2019 and the Medaram Jatara Festival in 2020. Read more here.

The awards were distributed across 15 categories and Selection Panel consisted of some of the stellar names in India’s AI ecosystems such as Gargi B Dasgupta of IBM, B Ravindran of IIT Madras, and Rostov Ravanan. To find out more about the winners and some of the impactful AI implementations in India, check out the AI Gamechangers Compendium here.