The four-day Xperience AI Virtual Summit aims at preparing India for a new future replete with digitization and adaptive solutions, driven by AI. India’s efforts to propel towards digital preparedness have been rapid in the last few years, but a pandemic has certainly accelerated the pace of these developments. Revival of the economy is a primary focus now, and can be achieved by digitization. One would normally assume that this burden needs to be carried out solely by the workforce but this isn’t the case at all. This is a chance for India to reinvent the wheel in terms of skilling and education, and move towards integrated and inclusive education models.

A panel on Building AI Talent at Scale With A Collaborative Outlook on Day 1 of the Xperience AI Summit was aiming to articulate efforts of various organisations and governments to bring about change from the ground up.

The panelists were Ramanan Ramanathan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission; Navin Mittal, Commissioner of College and Technical Education, Govt of Telangana, Indrani Choudhary, Chief Learning Officer, Microsoft India and Arjun Mohan, CEO of UpGrad. The session was moderated by Amit Aggarwal, CEO, NASSCOM Sector Skills Council.

Role of ATL and Niti Aayog in Rebuilding India’s Approach to Education

Ramanan Ramanathan of Atal Innovation Mission believed that AI will permeate all sectors, especially healthcare, education, governance and retail. The relevant demographic dividend needs to be educated and skilled accordingly, he said. For this purpose, AIM established Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) across India’s schools. The purpose of ATLs are to allow children to tinker around technology at a formative age, allowing the concepts to develop more productively. ATLs are a deliberate step in the direction of problem solving and problem identification, instead of rote learning that is common to India’s education system. To date, there are 5,000 ATLs and 2.5 million students are exposed to emerging technologies, through DIY kits that teach IoT, AI, ML and AR/VR among other concepts. Another significant step forward was launching the AI Module and AI Step Up Module for school-level upskilling, and introducing Python (a commonly used computer language by AI practitioners) at the college level. By the time students get to the university level, they have a competent working knowledge of AI and can start ideating on an industry-specific level, develop their own products or solutions. However, research efforts need to be ramped up, believes Ramanan.

How Governments Can Empower & Enhance Skills

A successful government strategy can become an implementable model for other states to follow suit. The government of Telangana has been tech-forward for a long time now. It declared 2020 as the Year of AI, and recently launched an initiative called AI4AI which is Artificial Intelligence for Agricultural Innovation. Primarily, the change is driven from the grassroot, believes Navin Mittal. He shed light on the impetus given to teaching infrastructure to favour technologies like AI such as new courses introduced by IIT Hyderabad and a research focused CoE for AI and ML at the Osmania University. More than 50 incubation centres in and around the city of Hyderabad is aimed at encouraging budding entrepreneurs at the college level to join and derive the maximum benefits of a highly networked ecosystem.

Making Organisations Tech-Forward and Independent

Indrani Choudhary spoke how the trend about the decade ago was technology-first organizations enjoyed a monopoly of sorts over technologies, but today, every other organization is building its technology capability. At such times, tech veterans like Microsoft are enabling organisations to enhance these capabilities, and assist a larger cross section of people become more comfortable with technology. Data scientists and engineers are hard to train, and harder to retain, she says. And the knowledge of technology is not the only capability that organisations need to build – a basic working knowledge of technologies like AI will benefit decision makers and consumers too. She cited examples like Microsoft’s “low-code” platform with simple drag and drop features, intended to greatly empower the user; and the Azure platform for agritech that provides even farmers a basic understanding of how the tech helps them drive profits and grow crops better. “They don’t need to know programming, but they can understand how programming-led software actually benefits them. The kind of learning is agile.”

Making Education Accessible and Personalised

While skilling at the school level captures the mindshare of government bodies, startups like UpGrad are aiming to help skilled individuals further enhance their capabilities. Arjun Mohan says there are several constraints in the existing education system – but with technology, these challenges are effectively addressed, such as online learning can have a very large number of students at a time, and course schedules are shorter but more intense, allowing for those with specialisations pick very niche subjects to accelerate their growth. Adding to Indrani’s point on democraticising technology, Mohan said that it is imperative for various job profiles to have a working knowledge of emerging technologies, and platforms like UpGrad can make this course content very accessible.

Xperience AI Virtual Summit is taking place from September 1 - 4. Register here