IBM India and South Asia managing director Sandip Patel on Thursday said there is a need to have the right kind of use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) that will make it relevant for businesses to take up the technology.
Speaking at the CII Global Economic Policy Forum, Patel said, “There is a need to create awareness of what AI can do, how it can be leveraged, and what are the right use cases to make it relevant and useful for business.”
“I think that is incumbent on all of us to learn because if we don’t understand using AI for the right use cases, making it consumable is going to be difficult,” Patel added.
Comments from Patel assume significance as companies in India are in the experimental stage and are trying to understand how they can leverage new technologies like generative AI. Recently, Dell’s chief technology officer John Roese also said that the implementation of generative AI technologies will remain slow as they are looking for relevant use cases that generate return on investments (RoI) for them.
Amid increase in cases of deepfakes and misinformation, the Centre is looking at ways to regulate AI, while not hampering innovations. The government is looking at possibilities to amend IT rules, before addressing the regulation of AI in the upcoming Digital India Bill.
“Safety and using AI responsibly is really, really important. And this is where using the models accurately, having transparency and fairness in the models is key,” Patel said, adding that AI regulation should not hamper innovation for startups and businesses.
Apart from regulation, Patel also talked about the need to have the right set of skills to utilise technology efficiently.
Addressing the issues around regulation, IT secretary S Krishnan said, “light-touch regulation for AI along with space for innovation would be an important way to go, while we guard against all the other possible harms.”
Lately, there have also been concerns around the inherent bias in AI-based systems.
“There are clearly inbuilt biases in some of the models that are popular around the world right now, and for a country the size of India, where multiple languages are spoken having more content and having more of it built around domestic use cases will enable us to actually develop useful models,” Krishnan added.
According to PWC, AI can potentially contribute about $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
