AI to have huge impact on future of businesses, but challenges exist- QHN

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), the most talked about tech aspect of AI, can throw up huge opportunities in the next few years, according to top industry leaders and technologists at the Business Standard TechTalk.

ChatGPT, an example of generative AI, can produce various types of content, including audio, imagery, text and synthetic data. The recent buzz around generative AI has been driven by the simplicity of new user interfaces for creating high-quality graphics, videos and text in a matter of seconds.

The first impact of generative AI is people. Many are wondering if generative AI will take away jobs. But the panellists at the Business Standard event said that this could well be an opportunity when it comes to job creation.

“From the volume of creating jobs, there is an opportunity,” said Gopichand Katragadda, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Myelin Foundry, a deep-tech AI start-up and a former Tata Sons group chief technology officer.

“Today, I can produce photos and paintings using Midjourney (an AI programme and service) that are so real and it is amazing. That is fed from real paintings and photographs. If you want to have that kind of data to have true Indian faces, that is an opportunity. Then, there are the opportunities related to high-end algorithms as well.”

Shashank Mohan Jain, chief development architect, SAP Business Technology Platform, said that ‘gen­­­­e­rative AI’ takes one to a paradigm where even a person who is not a computer science graduate can be a good programmer.

“It opens up a plethora of opportunities for all of us to build applications just by using conversations with the system,” said Jain. He added, “Earlier, you had to be properly trained and have the right skills. That barrier would wane off as more and more generative AI models come to the fore.”

While generative AI has created a huge buzz at the consumer end, enterprises are still cautious about its use. This is because there are issues like copyright, trust and privacy that need to be addressed.

Deepak Pargaonkar, vice-president of Solution Engineering, Salesforce India, agreed that there is a huge opportunity for organisations. They can leverage a lot of capabilities, but one has to consider what the end use is.

“Then, there are other parameters about how safe and trusted it is going to be and how transformative it is going to be,” said Pargaonkar.

Manish Gupta, vice-president, infrastructure solutions group, Dell, is of the view that there is a lot of excitement related to the potential of generative AI in the industry. But he said one has to look at whether there are very clear monetisation opportunities for enterprises.

“At this point, I would say it is still a question mark and that would evolve over the next six months and beyond,” said Gupta.

Abhijit Mazumder, chief information officer at TCS, also agreed that the opportunity around generative AI is huge. He said one should compare this to where the internet was 25 years back or Cloud was 10 years back.

“4G is a good example. Each one of them has sprouted a new business model, which would not have existed in the absence of such technologies. Ride-hailing apps like Uber and Ola would not have been there without 4G and Cloud together. So, there is a huge generative AI opportunity, but if you ask us to pinpoint where exactly that opportunity is, we don’t know that. And, that is the fun part of it and it is unexplored. That excites all of us.”

AI is an opportunity and its use cases have increased over the decade. Also, every technology upgrade has meant an equal number of challenges too. Overall, to implement AI technology among enterprises, Gupta of Dell said the biggest challenge is data, which one has to create, protect and govern.

He said, “The biggest challenge is how to take this into production. You need to have the innovator (business leader), creator (developer), implementor (data scientist) and consumer (user group) all sitting together and thinking along the same lines.”

Jain said there are challenges even inside the organisations to share the data with software development and operations teams, due to concerns around data privacy and information security. “The biggest challenge is how do you gather that data and curate it,” said Jain.

In the Indian context, the issue is if the customer will go all the way to implement AI into its businesses in a serious way. Katragadda said that his AI firm wanted to work 100 per cent for Indian customers and did 80 per cent of the proof of concept for them.

“However 80 per cent of our revenue and contracts came from abroad,” said Katragadda, adding, “We got (foreign) customers, without going abroad.”

However, awareness about technologies such as AI and the importance of data and changing processes are growing inside organisations.

Viswanath Ramaswamy, vice-president, technology, IBM India and South Asia, said five years ago enterprises didn’t have the role of chief data officer. That position exists now in most large corporates and enterprises.

Ramaswamy said, on another end of the spectrum, there are manufacturing and retail sectors, which are not highly regulated compared to banking.

However, the need for survival made them change. “If you don’t change, somebody else is going to eat your lunch. And, that ‘somebody’ is an organisation, which is data-ready and AI-driven,” said Ramaswamy. He added, “The competitive forces have forced the legacy organisations to change.”

However, there are challenges related to the democratisation of high-end technologies such as AI and Cloud by large tech companies and making them accessible to small businesses. 

Pargaonkar said that most organisations, including Salesforce, have realised that growth is coming from everywhere — from large as well as small enterprises.

He said that tech firms are making efforts to reach out to small businesses and are even creating plug-and-play products and solutions, which are relevant to them. Gupta said many of these small firms don’t have a chief information officer. He said to democratise technology at the grass-roots level, there is a need to build an ecosystem.

“There is a need to bring partners across the board. If you have a Rs 10-crore organisation in Jabalpur and it does not have a CIO, the ecosystem partner acts as the CIO,” said Gupta.

IBM is already doing this. Ramaswamy said there is a client engineering unit inside IBM, which actually takes up the business problem of a client and solves it.

Ramaswamy said this client could be a Rs 10-crore to a Rs 1,000-crore organisation. He added, “We are building an ecosystem where every organisation can benefit from AI or technology.”

Mazumder said there is a hunger within smaller organisations to leverage technology.

He said technology is scaling up in industries like e-commerce, especially vendors working with firms such as Amazon and Flipkart. However, there is a gap in industries like manufacturing for technologies and that is a huge opportunity.

Buzz Words

Organisations need to decide what is the end use and then look at how safe, trusted and transformative it is 

Deepak Pargaonkar, Salesforce

From a volume and job creation point of view it’s an opportunity. I know of start-ups who are working with Open AI on creating culturally contextual sensitive data

Gopichand Katragadda, Myelin Foundry

Generative AI… opens a plethora of opportunities to build applications just by using conversations 

Shashank Mohan Jain, SAP Labs

At this point can organisations create a huge monetisation opportunity…that will still evolve the next 6 months or so

Manish Gupta, Dell

If we compare AI to where cloud was a decade back or how the internet evolved…each sprouted HUge business models. GAI is also on a similar journey 

Abhijit Mazumder, TCS

I would draw the analogy of video games… It will start as a consumer play, but will certainly reach enterprises too