The National Association of Software and Service Companies, or NASSCOM, is the premier trade body and chamber of commerce of the Tech industry in India. Guided by India’s vision to become a leading digital economy globally, it focuses on accelerating the pace of transformation of the industry, enabling it to emerge as the preferred enablers for global digital transformation.

Addressing NASSCOM, the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, said, “Looking at the image India’s technology has today globally, the country pins its hopes on you. A lot of aspirations ride on you.”

Let’s go through the efforts made by NASSCOM in line with these aspirations in the year 2021:

IoT and AI Centre, Vishakhapatnam

In collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Government of Andhra Pradesh, NASSCOM launched a center of excellence (CoE) Andhra University Campus, Visakhapatnam. Launched in November 2021, the CoE is focused on AI and the internet of things and aims at promoting innovation in emerging technologies.

Shedding more light on the initiative, NASSCOM released a statement saying “The new center advances Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India vision by providing open labs and infrastructure to create and validate solutions from design to prototype to democratize innovation. It also promotes entrepreneurship by providing an incubation facility for peer-to-peer learning and the benefit of an industrial environment.”

Taiwan-India AI Tech Collaboration

To tackle the global semi-conductor shortage in 2020, NASSCOM CoE-IoT (Centre of Excellence for Internet of Things) signed an intent of cooperation Taiwan-India Artificial Intelligence Technology Innovation Research Center in September 2021. This collaboration is expected to help Indian tech startups source hardware components from Taiwan during their prototyping or production phases.

“Given the supply chain challenges, the signing of this MoU will play a critical role in enabling our countries to institutionalize industrial collaboration leading to enhancing our ability to source hardware components, increase investments and technical cooperation on an equal and mutually beneficial basis. NASSCOM looks forward to accelerating this critical partnership by facilitating Taiwanese companies to set up in India and create business opportunities with the budding startups,” said Shivendra Singh, Vice president, Global Trade Development, NASSCOM.

Xperience AI Virtual Summit, 2021

In August 2021, NASSCOM launched the second edition of its XperienceAI Summit with the theme ‘AI as a Catalyst for a Better Normal’. The summit focussed on the ‘how’ of three critical areas – Driving impact for a better world, India AI roadmap to scale adoption, and Creating value with innovation - to create actionable recommendations and insights that shape the better normal.

In its second year, the NASSCOM summit bought together with the entire AI ecosystem including the government, AI experts, academicians, industry experts, start-ups, researchers, and practitioners to discuss the role of AI in building a better future for India and the world.

AI Patent Report

To provide an understanding of the patent landscape of AI in India, NASSCOM Research and INDIAai unveiled a special report titled ‘AI Patents – Driving Emergence of India as an AI Innovation Hub’. Launched as a part of NASSCOM’s one-hour digital event on 18th June 2021, the report gives a broad outlook of the techno-legal field of AI patents and the key trends across a number of patents, assignees, and application areas.

While launching the report, Neha Jain, Senior Analyst, NASSCOM Insights, revealed that “India is ranked 8th in the world for AI patent filing and 4th in terms of AI research papers. AI patent filing in India will maintain an upward trajectory as India is emerging as a key destination for AI innovation.”

AI Gamechangers Programme

In an effort to promote AI-led innovation in the country, NASSCOM collaborated with Microsoft and launched the ‘AI Gamechangers’ program in March 2021. As part of NASSCOM’s AI for India mission, the program recognized scalable and impactful AI-based innovation in the country. AI Gamechangers served as a platform for start-ups, enterprises, academia, governments, and NGOs to showcase their AI-based products and solutions, providing reach and impetus to drive AI innovation for the country.

“The past decades have seen a dramatic growth of innovation and talent in India. While the country continues to leap forward to become the global innovation hub, we expect AI to unlock $500 Bn of value to India’s GDP by 2025. Through this program, we aim to spotlight some of the leading AI-based innovations in the country, not only to recognize their efforts but to motivate the larger ecosystem to leverage this opportunity to help India become a global powerhouse in AI-led innovation”, said Ms. Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM.