Union commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Saturday indicated that artificial intelligence may not get industry status anytime soon. “In today’s tech world, it just doesn’t matter what tag you give it, what matters is our ability to engage and compete with the best in the world,” Goyal said at the Mumbai Tech Week.
He added that the only tag that the AI sector needs is success, and expressed confidence on India’s AI ecosystem. “On the contrary, if you give an industry tag, you will call the inspectors to your house. What is the use?” he quipped.
Advocating for the AI sector to be solution-oriented, Goyal said it should take lessons from the IT services industry which rewrote the back-end calendar code at the turn of the millennium, just solving the Y2K conundrum.
Until 1999, many computer programmes used only two digits to represent the year (such as “99” for 1999). At the turn of the 21st century, computers would misinterpret “00” as the year 1900 which would have caused miscalculations that would disrupt computer systems and networks. To solve this, Indian IT companies like Infosys and Wipro rewrote the code.
“After that, the software or the IT industry never looked back. But one of the defining features was they kept the government at bay. IT industry never comes to the government. We have to call them. They never ask for anything,” Goyal said.
The world’s AI journey would be incomplete without India, and many economies acknowledge the same, he said, adding that AI has been figuring prominently in government’s free trade agreements, and trade negotiations.
Other aspects of AI that the government has been focussing on include digital engagement, data privacy, free flow of data, data localisation, and the regulations around data usage.
Goyal also reiterated that the human mind will always prevail over artificial intelligence. He said that while some redundant and repetitive tasks would move to AI-led solutions, the human mind will be needed to validate the outcomes of AI-led processes.
“But at the same time, we recognise it will involve re-skilling, re-training, re-checking our business processes. All of which will lead to more efficiency. All of which will lead to a better way of working,” he said.
