Aligning talent, infra, policy key for tech leadership

With population and data availability at scale alongside technology computing advantage, India can leverage AI by getting wider access with localisation, lower costs, tapping the cost arbitrage to attain technology leadership, global executives said . A panel on 'AI Unleashed: The Next Great Innovation Race' brought together Vishal Sikka, founder and CEO of Vianai Systems; Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient; Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq, and Chris Perry, president of Broadridge Financial Solutions. The session was moderated by management thinker Navi Radjou.

The leaders said India is uniquely placed to lead if it can align its talent, infrastructure, and policy push.

"We have to switch our perspective from, how is this going to affect our jobs...to how does this empower us?" said Sikka. The former Infosys CEO now helps businesses simplify their IT by developing conversational analytics tools that allow business users to query and analyse data directly. Sikka believes in the need to bridge the gap of accessibility. "In the Indian context, you go to creators or artists, or artisans and people like these, there is a big bridge to be built between them and AI systems...To give them access, it needs a usability, needs local languages, (needs) understanding their domain, where they're coming from, their context, and things like that," Sikka said. Ross, whose company Groq builds AI chips, focused on speed as the core innovation driver. Faster token generation, he argued, allows researchers and enterprises to iterate more quickly, accelerating discovery. "...given a certain speed, we cost much less, which allows us to run fast but also run cheaper. In Indian market in particular, cost is important." "The biggest issue I've seen while I've been here in India, it's actually the language gap. These models are not trained very well on the Indian languages. Indian companies have that data," Ross said. He said companies must use data to finetune and train existing open-source models, partnering with existing players and benefit for free, instead of creating their own models from scratch. Sikka, however, stressed that India cannot afford to depend solely on foreign-built platforms.

Vaz of Publicis Sapient, which offers companies AI solutions to escape "tech debt" from outdated systems that still absorb as much as 80% of IT budgets, believes the power of AI can change the economics, which is relevant to India. Perry of Broadridge, which uses AI to provide infinite personalisation, pointed out that with 1.6 billion population, "If India doesn't transition from an offshore, low-cost arbitrage to a tech leadership innovator, AI is going to be its biggest problem."