Anant Maheshwari, Microsoft India president, highlights that India is already third in the list of countries with AI skill sets.Microsoft is expecting India to play a great role in the Artificial Intelligence revolution that is gripping the world. Anant Maheshwari, Microsoft India president, highlights that India is already third in the list of countries with AI skill sets.
And with good reason. “India is at a unique position to play a great role in this revolution,” says Maheshwari, adding how we are at a convergence point for tools, data and the cloud, all key ingredients for AI technologies.
“As of now, only 8 per cent of India’s GDP is affected by digital technologies. But this number will be be 60 per cent in 2021,” he says, adding how being such a big population we are generating data at a huge scale. Maheshwari was addressing media and analysts at the Microsoft R&D Centre in Bangalore.
“The world is a computer today… everyone is generating data. The whole computing fabric of the world is continuous.” For the record, the world now produces about 16 Zetabytes of data every year.
But when we all start asking what we would like to predict, Maheshwari said, the range of what is possible with Artificial Intelligence will explode. His optimism is not unfounded.
The explosion of AI-driven technologies is bringing down the cost of predicting something like never before. “That power in now in the hands of a lot of people and this is what will drive the tech industry,” he added.
The explosion of AI-driven technologies is bringing down the cost of predicting something like never before.“This is not futuristic, but happening right now.”
However, Sundar Srinivas, Microsoft’s GM for AI, primes this vision with a bit of reality. “It not what we can do with AI, but what we should do or what we should not,” he said, underlining how it was time to set some principles and ethics of AI.
There is good reason why these questions are discussions are happening. Underlining breakthroughs in Microsoft AI, Srinivas said in vision tests, speech recognition and comprehension, the success rate was now at human parity.
That means they are already as good as humans in some cognitive skills. The way AI is constructed, it will only get better.
Underlining breakthroughs in Microsoft AI, Srinivas said in vision tests, speech recognition and comprehension, the success rate was now at human parity.This could also mean a large demand for reskilling as it is estimated that at least about 40 per cent of employees will soon be working on skills they don’t possess at the moment, says Rohini Srivastava, National Technology Officer of Microsoft India.
The writer is in Bangalore on the invite of Micorosoft India.
