Artificial Intelligence (AI) can usher in a generation of creativity and its adoption across industries would not result in job losses. It would rather open a plethora of employment opportunities. Further, trusted or harmonised data is the need of the hour to avoid AI hallucinations, Steve McMillan, president and CEO of Teradata told FE in an interaction.
From an employment perspective, the automotive industry continues to grow, contributing to the world economy, despite the implementation of automation and robotic automation.
“AI has the same opportunity. AI can usher in a generation of creativity. It will enable people to be much more creative, efficient and effective. The effectiveness of AI depends on the purity of the data, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out,” McMilan said.
“AI would add $4 trillion to the global economy, and adding in productivity and efficiency improvements, it would rise to $8 trillion. I think that’s a massive opportunity for India also,” he said.
Talking on AI hallucinations, where AI programs give incorrect output, McMillan said trusted data is the need of the hour.
“Hallucinations happen when the Gen AI engine is fed with erroneous or incorrect data. The focus from a Teradata perspective is to ensure what we call it harmonised data. While the large language models (LLMs) are getting a lot of press today, the real opportunity would be for mid and small language models,” he added.
Globally, data analytics and AI would top IT spend, which would be followed by cybersecurity and then cloud.
“Cybersecurity has been one of the key spend areas for a chief information officer, while data analytics and AI has just become the number one spend area for organisations. There is also a growth explosion in the cloud,” McMillan said.
From Teradata’s perspective, the top industries are banking and financial services, government, transportation and healthcare. “Further, government and healthcare are two industries that really need disruption, just because of the massive amounts of data involved.”
Teradata, which has a “good proportion” of its total 6,400 global employees in India, finds the skills and capabilities great in the country. “We have been doing a lot of investments in terms of analytics, AI and machine learning skills in India,” he added.