In 1940, amid World War 2, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated famously- "never let a good crisis go to waste." A quote which has been misrepresented ever since. However, it meant that in challenging times one must question the accepted reality as things are going wrong, while seeking rapid answers and solutions may found outside the usual compass. And that seemed to be the case with India's AI adoption rates, which is now showing a significant rise due to the pandemic driven crisis. 

According to a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the rate of AI adoption in India's private sector has increased from 62% to 70%, with many organisations making changes in the way they run business and make decisions, to emerge stronger from the COVID crisis. The nature of these AI adoption is also seeing a shift from a purely technological one to more business-related. This new trend is not just limited to India. However, India leads the charts with a 45% increase in AI adoption due to COVID compared to US's 35% and Japan's 28%.

Across the globe despite the economic challenges that the pandemic mitigation have caused, many organisations now seeing the most value from AI are doubling down on the technology, according to McKinsey's State of AI report for 2020. The use of AI in healthcare and pharmaceutical industry grew significantly as a result of the pandemic, while the major drivers in India's AI adoption were hospitality and travel sector- an area that was devastatingly affected by the pandemic. 

In case of sectors such as manufacturing and IT service, the rise in AI adoption comes as a result of reconfiguring to more automated processes, use of the tech for secure remote work processes, to address the lack of onsite resources, and to mitigate the cybersecurity risks created as a result. 

On the other hand, in the case of retail, COVID has forced to a whole kind of product strategy in retail, especially with CPG or FMCG sector, forcing many brands to change and adapt. Traditionally, the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) sector is dependant on qualitative field-based research, even years after the emergence of data and analytics powered methods. The field research, which is often long and expensive, has already put many of the bigger brands lagging in the market, as the smaller and newer competition started to use AI-powered tools for predicting market trends. 

As a result, according to Harvard Business Schools' Clayton Christensen, out of 30,000 products launched last year, especially in the western economies, 95% of them failed in the market. This, along with the increased difficulty for doing qualitative field-based research due to COIVD pandemic has pushed brands to resort on more insightful and predictive models based on social data. This has now enabled them to understand and anticipate consumer behaviour. 

This is just one case of COVID forced AI adoption that has been proving to be successful. Travel and hospitality industry is now recovering thanks to dynamic pricing modelling and context-aware target marketing. Many experts are now pointing out, just like how communication technologies are now proving that we can work remotely with similar efficiency and productivity as before, AI is helping many industries with the right insights. 

Today more and more Indian enterprises have implemented AI in some business or departments, and according to the PwC survey, that number stands at 46% as opposed to 28% globally. Furthermore, optimism regarding the adoption of AI has also gone up to 92% in COVID period as opposed to 72% in pre-COVID. 

With many organisation resorting more and more on AI to overcome the unexpected challenges COVID pandemic has thrown their way, alongside increased accessibility and lower costs, it is quite clear that AI adoption will now only increase in faster rate even in a post-COVID world.