The Global IndiaAI Summit 2024 is being held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, on Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024. The summit conducted a session on the topic “IndiaAI: Real World AI Solutions,” which is part of the IndiaAI Application Development Initiative, one of the seven pillars of the IndiaAI mission.  

Surabhi Agarwal, Editor Technology, Economic Times, moderated the session. Mr. Jayesh Ranjan, Special Chief Secretary, Government of Telangana and Sh. Sanket S Bhondve, Joint Secretary, MeitY, delivered the keynote addresses during the session. Other panellists of the session include Dr. Alpan Raval, Chief ML Scientist, Wadhwani AI; Ms. Amrita Mahale, Head of Product, ARMAAN; Mr. Vishal Sunil, CTO of Rocket Learning; Dr. Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder, Sarvam AI; Ms. Aditi Namdeo, Director, Strategic Initiative, J-PAL; Mr. Manu Chopra, CEO, Karya; Ms. Priya Nagpurkar, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and AI Platform, IBM Research and Ms. Srujana Merugu, Principal Scientist, Amazon. 

Jayesh Ranjan, in his keynote speech, said, “Lack of accountability or responsibility is the sole reason for the huge gap between the intent and action in AI deployment into various sectors. To bridge this gap, Telangana had set up an independent institution to implement an AI framework called T-AIM”, he opined. 

Sanket S Bhondve, in his keynote address, noted that AI can majorly impact infrastructures. Sanket emphasised how e-Sanjeevani assists in virtual diagnoses.  

Three case studies were presented, which were eye-openers in showing how AI can be leveraged in the healthcare and education sectors.  

Alpan Raval presented his case study on the Tuberculosis projects run by Wadhwani AI, predominantly for underserved communities. Amrita Mahale presented their flagship program, “mMitra” by ARMAAN, which was deployed for maternal and child health with a focus on preventive care. In his presentation, Vishal Sunil showed how Rocket Learning tries to bridge the learning gap for underserved preschool and primary children across India.  

Surabhi Agarwal started the panel discussion by reminding us that “AI apps are really the ones that will be leading the next generation or next phase of development in the world.” Though AI is currently elite, she believes the next phase of its development will touch all lives equally.  

AI best practices 

Srujana Merugu commented on the aspects that she believes are prevalent in the corporate world and could be taken to the social sector. According to Srujana, the first one is the “Platform”. “The strong cognizant of the cruciality of platforms and the huge focus of using AI to improve platform efficiency can benefit the social sector”, she added. Another one is the “Process” of developing AI models. The emergence of foundation models results in the huge democratisation of AI capabilities. Srujana emphasised “Purpose” as the third aspect. There is a common purpose, so aligning disparities and multiple solutions is easier. “The more visibility on what we need to optimise can benefit the social sector”, she added.  

AI democratisation 

While commenting on the aggregation of various AI use cases into government projects in order to drive efficiency, Dr Vivek Raghavan said the key point that needs to be understood is that several projects need to be done across the country. All the AI use cases are unique, and everyone is different. “When we analyse one layer below, there is a wide range of commonalities between these use cases. Unless we consider each one independent, we can extract the core commonality and make it available in a form that various people can build on top of it easily", Dr Vivek added.  

Addressing privacy risks  

“Low-income communities are excellent builders and beneficiaries of AI”, says Manu Chopra. He added that India is both the AI use case capital as well as the AI building capital for the world. He emphasised that people should be employed to take all the precautions regarding privacy. According to him, it enables further economic opportunities. To centre the communities in the conversation of AI, Manu advises, “To build inclusive AI, you have to start employing the people you want to include”.  

Leveraging the potential of AI by governments 

Aditi Namdeo emphasised the genuine need for AI collaborations, bringing developers, tech giants, policymakers, donors, and evaluators under a single roof. According to Aditi, “As we have gone through the limitation of the potential the technology can reach, only by bringing each category of AI collaborators under one roof can harness the potential of AI for social good”. She highlighted the dire need to co-develop a socio-technical framework of development that can only be facilitated by the government.  

Critical takeaways for scaling deployment of AI 

“Enabling seamless computers across hybrid environments, be it hybrid clouds, mobile phones, and other devices, will be a key element for successfully scaling AI deployment,” says Priya Nagpurkar. Data privacy and regulations are a few of the requirements that result in a hybrid environment, along with the availability of resources.  

Surabhi concluded that when it comes to the digital divide, the AI divide needs to be pondered in order to make it more inclusive by leveraging AI for all.