One of India’s biggest success stories in recent times is the technology sector. From being a flourishing, cost-friendly offshore centre to becoming one of the Asia’s most exciting innovation hubs, the three-decade journey has been extraordinary. There has been no dearth of fresh ideas, cutting-edge innovation and research emerging from India’s captive centres, startups and technology companies. And with the advent of emerging technologies like AI, India shows no signs of slowing down. The AI wave has pretty much every industry in its irresistible grip.

Artificial Intelligence has been witnessing a surge in the past five decades globally and has well and truly traversed from lab to market, step by step. While India started warming up to AI only in the past decade, industry watchers and leaders knew the transformative power of this technology from the get-go. Consider financial services, healthcare, education, governance, energy, manufacturing, retail… AI’s applications are endless.

Yet, there’s a lot more to be done. With over a billion people across a huge landmass belonging to diverse strata of society, India presents a uniquely challenging landscape for technology to address.

At Xperience AI Virtual Summit, a fireside chat between Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO and Chairperson, Salesforce India; Dr. Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals Enterprises and Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM was especially enlightening. With a rich body of experience covering financial sector services, healthcare and enterprise cloud software services and having navigated their businesses through the tide of digital transformation being seen in the past decade, Dr. Reddy and Ms Bhattacharya spoke about the immensely transformative power of AI and the crucial role of C-suite leaders to truly democratize this technology in the future, so it can go a longer way in addressing grassroot level challenges.

Banking & Healthcare – The Long Haul To Tech Adoption

India’s financial services sector is as diverse and multi-layered as it gets. Radical banking reforms introduced at the time of sweeping liberalization reforms ushered in a new era of financial maturity in India. The financial services sector has had a long-standing relationship with technology, and the two have augmented user experience over the years. Today, technologies like AI are addressing some of the harder issues in banking like credit scoring, faulty underwriting and fraud detection. Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO and Chairperson of Salesforce India, spent four decades at State Bank of India as Chairman and has navigated the bank through several tides of change. She particularly focused on digital transformation during her tenure at SBI, having spearheaded several unique initiatives like installing fully digitized bank branches in malls – a first for Indian banks at the time. “The young, new-age professional in India isn’t enamoured by the brick-and-mortar model of a bank. He needs to see that financial services too are adapting with times, becoming savvy and going digital.”

Dr. Reddy is the Joint Managing Director of Apollo Hospitals, which is one of the largest hospital chains in the country. While she was a strong advocate of digital transformation in healthcare, Dr. Reddy knew adoption was easier said than done. More than the patient, it was contingent on medical staff to truly drive adoption of technology. Preferring to call AI Assisted Intelligence in medicine, Dr. Reddy believes it is imperative to show actual value of technology to the medical community, and adoption will follow. She cited the example of Apollo’s collaboration with Microsoft to develop an AI-powered Cardiovascular Disease Risk Score API, designed specifically to predict the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the Indian population. Over time, precision healthcare, genetic biomarkers, drug discovery and repurposing – aided with technology – are reducing diagnosis times and limiting the workload on healthcare workers. “Eventually, we want to get to a point where the doctors and nurses ask: how did we manage all this time without these tools? That’s when we know the risk and investment in tech has paid.”

C-Suite Should Evangelise Tech Adoption More

It is only natural to follow a leader, and this is especially true in big organisations. Dr. Reddy and Ms. Bhattacharya are strong proponents of technology themselves and believe that boards of companies must make a concentrated effort to prioritise technology evangelization. Dr Reddy specifically hoped that the role of a CIO or CTO should progress from a functional leader to a strategic business leader, where he can show the value of technology to concerned stakeholders. Ms Bhattacharya added that there is no reason Indian businesses cannot be at par with rest of the world in terms of AI adoption, provided they focus on value proposition, enhance skills of the workforce and governing bodies provide robust policies. With COVID19 touted to have accelerated digital adoption nearly six-fold, there is an opportunity in the midst of this crisis that should not be wasted. The time is right to start making fundamental changes in the way leaders approach digital transformation, and a top-down effect is essential for this change to stick.