Day 3 of Xperience AI Virtual Summit brought forth more conversations around AI and its development in India. NASSCOM President Debjani Ghosh kicked off the day’s sessions with a brief overview of India’s journey from adoption to implementation of AI. “Trust is the currency of the digital world.” And these words are the bedrock of today’s technology landscape that’s being dominated by AI.

A NASSCOM-McKinsey report last year stated that AI can contribute nearly $500bn to the Indian economy by 2025, scaling sectors like healthcare, education, energy, manufacturing. Technology will be the great leveller and enabler, and its now time for leaders and decision makers to enhance adoption successfully across these sectors. The transformative power of AI is well-known, but what remains to be discovered to transforming this potential to reality, she added.

These building blocks that are beckoning a new age in India’s tech landscape have culminated into a playbook – India’s own AI playbook, and comprise of five core pillars:

• Strategy, which includes overarching initiatives like the National AI Mission & National Language Translation Mission
• Data, which covers major policy developments like Non Personal Data, Data Utilisation Strategy and Responsible AI
• Talent for AI that can be achieved through national level skilling programmes like FutureSkills
• Tech Stacks like the data platformisation approach
• Innovation which can be tapped through Centres of Excellence, research initiatives and AI startups

India is already making an indelible impression as a global AI leader, and numbers support this observation - there are over 950 AI startups, 300,000 data analytics and AI professionals, more than 5,000 patents filed in the last decade, 85,000 research papers in the last 10 years and more than 50 viable use cases for government and public benefit. Moreover, a strong ecosystem of tech companies, government organisations, startups and academia - with the aim of democratizing tech solutions and building robust marketplaces for technology products and solutions - are helping India set high global benchmarks for leading adoption and implementation in AI.

Great strides have been initiated in the right direction, especially with the launch of a national AI strategy document rolled out by Niti Aayog in 2018, outlining basic guidelines for how AI should be applied across sectors. Globally, India’s efforts to make AI inclusive and bias-free has been appreciated. A recent Stanford University AI Index Report 2021 placed India at sixth place globally in the Global Vibrancy Ranking 2020, with a focus on parameters like diversity, ethics, inclusion and skilling.

For a country whose AI journey has truly diversified and been elevated to higher levels only in the last decade, this level of progress is impressive. However, building technology for the future is one that requires constant effort, mindshare, ideas and gumption to drive these ideas to execution.

India now needs to focus on:

• Access to quality data, and specifically focus on Natural Language Processing to leverage the power of AI for the common man
• Strengthen the industry-academia partnerships, which seem to have finally broken a long-standing impasse. But, Ghosh added that this collaboration should only become stronger over time
• Large-scale and wide implementation and execution remains a challenge. For AI to become the ubiquitous technology that it promises to be, execution should be seamless and fortified with collaboration
• Regulatory sandbox approach to nurture innovation

Ultimately, the onus is every single person – from customer to enabler to governance bodies – to ensure that a modicum of trust in Artificial Intelligence is built and strengthened over time.