In 2018, a NITI Aayog report stated that India will hold a late-mover advantage in real world application of artificial intelligence (AI). As speculated, India is swiftly forming into a leader today in the field of AI in multiple aspects. An IDC guide on AI spending reports that the nation has an expected CAGR of 33.5% ($3.4B) in AI spending by 2026 while a recent benchmarking report states that Indian businesses are ahead of their US and UK counterparts in terms of commercial AI adoption. The country also houses over 16% of the world’s AI talent pool.
There will be AI innovations aplenty on the sidelines of this constellation of exciting developments. Firstly, AI adoption will become even more mainstream, wherein the technology will become omnipresent in enterprise software. The B2B landscape will increasingly rely on embedded AI for dynamic process optimisation. Besides, we will also be seeing a lot of generative AI like DALL·E and ChatGPT in the year ahead, and it will be interesting to watch how it benefits enterprises.
The main concerns that will escalate with the booming AI growth are privacy and algorithmic/data bias. Regulations are not evolving as fast. While there are certain draft bills, no concrete laws have been enforced in any part of the world yet. Secondly, tackling AI bias requires businesses/AI vendors to train the baseline AI model with bias-free data sets.
(At Zoho, R&D will continue to be a core value of our business strategy and we plan to double our investments in AI and blockchain. On the AI front, we will work on strengthening our existing offerings, which includes Statistical Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing and High Speed Video Analytics. The technology will be deeply embedded across our entire product suite to enable contextual intelligence and will also be offered in more vernacular languages. Besides, CRM will get more AI to empower CX teams to sell better and serve customers effectively. As always, we will ensure none of these come at the cost of user privacy.)
The author is Mr. Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director – AI Research, Zoho Corp and the views expressed in this article are his own
