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Artificial Intelligence these days has become a much red-hot topic across diverse industries around the world. Its potential has already influenced a wide array of businesses, delivering efficiency and productivity. AI has the ability to bolster growth and transform businesses for big companies and industries. The technology has also garnered a lot of traction and is promised to deliver a much brighter future for India. According to a report, AI can add US$957 billion, or 15 percent of the current gross value, to India’s economy by 2035.

On the other hand, the United States and China have already emerged as the biggest players in AI. The technological development is anticipated to add US$15.5 trillion to global GDP by 2030, of which US$7 trillion and US$3.5 trillion benefits will amass to China and North America, respectively, as the PwC report.

Thus, comparing to these countries, India will require to shape its own artificial intelligence space. In this effort, the country has proposed to establish a National Program on AI during the fiscal year 2019 budget, which includes AI for All with a focus on healthcare, agriculture, education, transportation, infrastructure development, among others.

AI Policy in India

In June 2018, the government of India defined a national policy for AI, National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. In this policy report, NITI Aayog provided an introduction to the roadmap and the government’s plan to develop the sector in the nation. Along with focus areas where this technology development could enable both growth and greater inclusion, the reports further delineates five impediments which need to be addressed, including lack of research expertise; absence of enabling data ecosystems; high resource cost and low awareness for adoption; lack of regulations around privacy and security; and absence of a collaborative approach to adoption and applications.

Currently, AI adoption in India is slow and limited. Considering reports, just 22 percent of the business firms make use of AI, while the use of this technology was 78 percent globally in 2017, especially in China and the US.

Moreover, experts are also more concerned about that AI will create major socio-economic inequality and replace millions of jobs. It is said that the technology will replace 30-40 percent of the jobs in the US in the next 15 years. However, the estimations from McKinsey Global Institute reveal 50 percent of work is automatable with a reduction of 20-25 percent of employees by 2030.

In this context, NASSCOM predictions indicate that 46 percent of the workforce in India needs new skill sets by 2022, and there would be a 60 percent rise in demand for AI and machine learning experts. The country also requires RPA engineers, Computer Vision Engineers, Cloud architects, language processing specialists, 3D modeling engineers, and more, with additional 2 lakh data analytics specialists by 2020.

Artificial Intelligence and India

AI has the potential to transform the Indian industries by augmenting the traditional factors of production, labor, capital and innovation, and technological changes. The technology can also drive economic growth by enabling intelligent automation, ability to automate complex physical world tasks that require adaptability and agility across industries, according to the NITI Aayog report. AI can also enable labor and capital augmentation, allowing human workers to focus on parts of their role to add the most value, strengthening human capabilities and enhancing capital efficiency. The technology can drive innovation diffusion, propelling innovations as it diffuses through the economy, the report noted.

In a PwC survey, 60 percent of the participants believe AI would assist in furthering social causes and enabling human beings to live more fulfilling lives, including accelerating economic growth, improving global health and well-being, advancing cybersecurity and increasing efficiencies in imparting education.

In 2016, India produced 2.6 million STEM graduates, after China. However, just 4 percent of AI professionals had experience in deep learning and neural networks and only 1 percent of the data had been assessed. In the 2018 Global AI Talent Report, India has only 386 Ph.D. research scholars out of a total of 22,000 globally.

Furthermore, the traditional Indian IT industries are also slow to adopt new technologies, so they require a major revamp to create AI and machine learning capabilities to deliver enhanced customer experience that will ultimately boost economic growth. The country also requires to build enormous start-ups with government funding like other countries.