Sabarinath serves on the Prime Minister's Champions of Change panel for edtech and skills and has participated in international discussions on skill development.

With a background in computer science engineering and an MBA in marketing management, he started his career in deep tech before transitioning to product management at Vortex, where he became a leader in energy-efficient ATMs.

INDIAai interviewed Sabarinath to get his perspective on AI.

Can you elaborate on the role of AI in your simulations? How does AI contribute to ensuring error-free dexterity in training?

When integrated with technology like VR/XR, AI can enhance training outcomes in multiple ways. It can analyse individual learning patterns and optimise the training to suit their pace, strengths, and weaknesses.

By analysing large data sets with AI, the most commonly occurring errors or problem areas can be easily identified, and training modules can be built to address those for each industry or organisation specifically. 

Simulation technologies like VR and XR, inherently by themselves and when paired with AI, provide a precise assessment. They remove human bias and error, resulting in accurate evaluation across multiple parameters. We have witnessed firsthand instances of this when women who were thus far scoring less in male-dominated courses like welding started topping the batch when simulation-based training and evaluation were introduced! 

While there are many future possibilities for AI's specific contribution, at the moment, its main value is speeding up and automating technical tasks that used to take a long time and finding patterns faster, which can be used to adjust a curriculum or predict defects.

As a member of the Prime Minister's Champions of Change panel on edtech and skills, how do you see the future of skill development evolving in India with the integration of AI and immersive technologies?

Immersive technologies and AI hold much potential for skill development in a country like India, which has a large manufacturing sector and a large youth demographic. Contrary to popular belief, technologies like these can be quickly scaled and deployed at multiple locations and taken to even remote or rural areas easily. It can thus be the key to bridging the rural-urban divide, enabling a large section of youth everywhere to receive the same kind of training and skilling opportunities available to those in urban centres. While LLMs and GPUs have grabbed a lot of attention, many useful applications exist to speed up content creation or offer predictions - that could be more compute-heavy.

The good news is that a lot of work is being done in Indian regional languages, too. Earlier commercial software would have interfaces in many European languages, which have a small speaking population, but would not have for most Indian languages - this is changing, and this would have a multiplier effect on making any computing accessible to populations that may not speak English. AI enhances translations, and the emergence of LLMs in regional languages will enable more natural interactions with computing systems and break access barriers that have limited the potential of India's large population.

The proper use of technology will also make skill development and training in the future highly agile and dynamic, making it easy to change or modify curriculum and lesson structures to bring them on par with industry standards, where conventional training methods take years to be changed, updated, and for the change to percolate to actual users.  

AI is revolutionizing many industries. What are the most significant advancements in AI currently impacting the edtech and skill development sectors?

AI is showing us the potential to revolutionize many industries—an actual revolution is still in the works!

AI is more of an accelerator than a product or service by itself. It speeds up many tasks and, therefore, enables many more things to be done than possible.

Edtech and skilling sectors now have a wide range of offerings, making technology address learners' needs at all levels. AI can enable personalized learning experiences that can positively impact outcomes. Predictive analytics is a powerful tool that could benefit from AI - it can capture learning patterns and behaviours, which can then be used to identify weak spots and offer targeted interventions for learners or suggest more effective teaching strategies for educators. 

How do you stay updated with the latest trends and advancements in AI and immersive technologies? Can you share any resources or practices that you find particularly useful?

I make it a point to read up on the advancements constantly, what potential they can bring to most technology-enabled tasks, and what is the current actual state - many times, the actual usefulness gets drowned in the hype - there is often an over-promise, and there is disappointment with the results. AI is speeding things up in some areas but still requires a certain amount of human review. Even at that state, it saves a lot of time.

So, after an initial trial, I clinically evaluate present-day usefulness for adoption, keeping a very open mind and periodically checking in on the improvements.

How do you envision the role of AI in transforming traditional vocational training and education in the next five years?

Once the hype cycle dies off, the genuine use cases will be highlighted. As different components and applications of AI come together, this will have a multiplier effect. 

For example, voice-to-text is improving with AI; translation is improving with AI; LLMs are helping refine and better articulate - when these three components can integrate well, barriers that hitherto restricted benefits of technology to more English-knowing population will disappear - human-machine-interfaces will become more natural - someone who does not have the skills to type in English can speak to a machine in their native language, it can get into text form, translated etc - access becomes much more accessible.

I imagine how, 20 years ago, Google Search and Web 2.0 changed how the internet was consumed. AI will have similar ways of assimilating into our daily lives, not being a one-magic pill for everything like many are hyping it to be.

The speed of content creation becomes faster. One challenge in technical training has always been the lag between what the industry needs and whether education can catch up to update the curriculum. This gap can be shortened with AI.

What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs leveraging AI and immersive technologies to create impactful solutions in the edtech space?

The most important thing an entrepreneur should focus on is knowing what they are solving for. Only then will they be able to call if AI is the right solution. Figure out your market, the existing gaps, and what solution will fill that gap or solve that problem for your customers, and then decide how AI can be best used to build that solution. Deciding to use AI just because it is the trend and then trying to figure out what can be done with it will not be a sound approach and will not guarantee a product market fit. Young entrepreneurs should take a long-term strategy for what they want to build and avoid getting carried away by hype cycles. Today's Edtech space is already highly competitive, and entrepreneurs aspiring to enter it must focus on having a key differentiator and a sound value proposition they will bring to the customer to succeed. 

In many areas, regular algorithms are more than sufficient to solve an existing problem, and AI may complicate it. Many times, a regular algorithm of if-then-else is touted as AI! I recommend evaluating whether AI or ML brings tangible benefits to the end-user or speeds up prototyping/developing—if the answer is no, don’t do AI for the sake of doing it.