AI Superpower: The Leaders and The Contenders (PART - II)

Utpal Chakraborty, Head of Artificial Intelligence, YES Bank & AI Researcher

Utpal Chakraborty, Head of Artificial Intelligence, YES Bank & AI Researcher

In continuation of the article published in the previous edition, we will be discussing a bit more how China is transforming itself leveraging a disruptive technology like Artificial Intelligence –

AI in China:

Another reason China leading in AI essentially because it has been able to transformed itself into a Cashless, Card-Less, Mobile-Only economy. This helped collecting huge useable data which became incredibly useful for AI companies and other researchers to accelerate their AI development.

China is focusing hugely on AI Research as well. In the last 3-4 years the highest number of AI researcher papers and patents are been filled by Chinese companies and Chinese researchers. The reason China is paving its way towards AI superpower is because of the following reasons.

Firstly, China has huge amount of usable data which is basically fuel for AI. Chinese companies along with Chinese Govt. has been able to digitize many of their services used by the citizens because of which China has complete length, breadth and depth of data which is fundamental for AI to grow. China is the first truly mobile first country and Chinese market and Govt. embarrassed these transformation. Secondly, China has a powerful Venture Capitalist enterprise ecosystem. Huge fund is flowing to Chinese market and investors are ready to invest on Chinese companies and startups. The third reason is Chinese entrepreneurs are hardworking, huge hunger for success and compete like a true gladiators, do or die approach. The forth reason is, huge support from the Government democratizing AI.

Protectionist nature of Chinese Govt. provides domestic startups a space to settle down and grow to a level till it becomes ready to compete with the big global players in their early incubation period. Also, Chinese education is more about road learning, practical approach of learning and implementing. Chinese government and authorities are fully convinced about the fact that AI is the future and hence building their infrastructure to be “future AI ready” like a new city is planed near Beijing which is designed for autonomous vehicles. Similarly it is building a highways with sensors for autonomous vehicles as the lighting conditions in the road affects the autonomous vehicles the most which can be substantiated by sensors along the highways to avoid any kind of accidents.

It is also important to mention one major disadvantage of Chinese AI products that they have not been so successful in expanding beyond China. Moreover the language becomes a roadblock for Chinese entrepreneurs when it comes to globalizing their products. So, probably China is doing very good in the Chinese market but not great when it comes to expanding the business globally which is very essential in today’s context. Also, Chinese products whatever it could be have a bad reputation on the quality front.

UK & Europe, Japan, Russia – although having the potential and most of the ingredients for AI; has not yet been able to leverage those fully to come top in the list. They have huge usable data but they have lots of restrictions around it. So, companies probably are not been able to utilize it to the fullest. Moreover, despite having some of the brilliant AI researchers and AI professionals they don’t have the kind of tenacious and hardworking entrepreneurs at least in AI space. The VC ecosystem in UK and Europe is not that strong and mature. So the governments and the union need to do a lot of work to be ahead in the race. Similarly Japan and Russia- although having great potential but needs aggressive execution. Certainly they are strong contenders provided they work on the aspects mentioned above.

India – has a huge number of IT professionals ranging from highly skilled to moderate skilled who are already working on different top global companies and playing key roles developing global products or managing global operations. They understand such products, they have fair understanding of business models and many of them have already jumped into the startup world in India building their own products. Most of these startups are developing AI products in many different domains starting from known areas like banking & finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail etc. to uncommon domains like agriculture, fisheries, marine resources, water management, alternative medicines, Ayurveda, safety and empowerment of women just to name a few.

AI revolution in India has already started in a big way touching across almost all the areas that you can imagine and the world will see the actual results of the same in coming few years.

Also, the National strategy for Artificial Intelligence, India published by NITI Aayog couple of months back is an exhaustive plan and roadmap with a slogan of “AI-for-All in India”, which shows how seriously Aayog (commission) as well as Government has taken AI and trying to integrate it with every aspect of our country and its citizens.

This is a landmark and stepping stone for a developing country’s great ambition to integrate technology as main stream in its transformation journey which I believe no country has thought through it in that diversified manner.

This strategy clearly shows how our Aayog and our Government has been able to identify the core areas very specific to Indian conditions where AI can play a crucial role and uplift the economy and hence all other sectors. It has given equal importance to the Government, private and public sectors while fabricating such strategy; so you can imagine the depth of thought process, expertise, seriousness and die-heart effort that has gone into it to make AI Indianize.

AI is going to bring huge opportunity and will boost the Indian economy with an estimated annual growth rate of 1.3 percent and in a decade’s time an addition of extra one trillion USD is just humongous. As per experts India provides the perfect “playground” for enterprises and institutions globally to develop AI solutions which can be easily implemented in the rest of the developing and emerging economies and “Solved in India” mission is in perfect sync with Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS).

In healthcare Tata Memorial Hospital has started working on the “Cancer Heat Map” that can minimize with the adoption of AI for India’s cancer woes. The ‘Digital Pathology’ and another project under discussion namely the ‘Imaging Biobank’ for cancer will help the detection of the disease accurately and precisely in a very early stage. Indian start-up ‘Forus Health’ which has developed a portable device named “3Nethra” that can screen for common eye problems as well as complicated conditions like diabetic retinopathy. The Indian government has been making a series of large scale interventions to address India’s healthcare challenges, transformation of 1.5 lakh ‘Health and Wellness Centers’, developing district hospitals to cater to long-term care for non-communicable diseases, ‘Ayushman Bharat Mission’, promoting e-Health where AI has started playing a crucial role for its success.

AI is going to bring huge opportunity and will boost the indian economy with an estimated annual growth rate of 1.3 percent and in a decade’s time an addition of extra one trillion USD is just humongous

In Agriculture, in last couple of years approximately 50 Indian agricultural, AI technology based start-ups, AgTechs raised more than USD 500 million. Indian start-up, Intello Labs, for example, uses image-recognition software to monitor crops and predict farm yields. Aibono uses agri-data science and AI to provide solutions to stabilize crop yields. Trithi Robotics uses drone technology to allow farmers to monitor crops in real time and provide precise analysis of their soil just to name a few.

Also, solutions like crop health monitoring and providing real time action advisories to farmers and using image classification tools combined with remote and local sensed data bringing a revolutionary change in utilization and efficiency of farm machinery in Indian farming. AI powered applications for Soil Care, AI app for Sowing, App for Herbicide Optimization and AI app for Precision Farming are been implemented in many states in India.

In Education, Indian startups along with Central and State governments has already revolutionized rural and other education systems using adaptive learning tools for customized learning and intelligent and interactive tutoring systems. An example, Andhra Pradesh government is predicting School Dropouts using AI and taking measures to reduce it. AI tools has been used to automated rationalization of teachers and development of customized professional courses for identification and fulfillment of knowledge and skill gaps by couple of state governments and other educational bodies.

In the area of Smart Cities and Smart Leaving, a huge investment has been initiated for building Smart Parks & public facilities, Smart Homes, AI driven service delivery (such as predictive service delivery on the basis of citizen data, rationalization of administrative personnel on the basis of predicted service demand and migration trend analysis, and AI based grievance redressal through chat-bots and smart assistants), Crowd management, Intelligent safety systems, preventing cyber-attacks and many more.

In Transportation and Smart Mobility India Government has great attention on implementation of Artificial Intelligence to address issues related to Mobility and Transportation, specifically challenges we encountered in India on a daily basis.

Some of the challenging areas mentioned are Congestion and road accidents, High number of traffic deaths, Lack of public transportation infrastructure etc.

AI aided smart technologies like Assisted Vehicle, Greenfield Infrastructure, Autonomous Trucking, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Travel Route & Flow Optimization and Community Based Parking will be used to address many of these challenging areas.

But the most important areas which will take India to the fore front in AI race is the ‘National AI Marketplace (NAIM)’ and ‘Data Marketplace’. Some initial effort on these two areas has already been started but the day these two initiatives comes to a good shape, no one can stop India to be top in the list of AI Superpowers.

Many of the recent happenings in India on AI front brought about by Indian startups in collaboration with Tech Giants and in association with premier Tech Institutes and the government has not got that media hype globally but trust me, there are many brilliant things has started happening in this country and the whole world will see the results in coming few years.

Although lately but the entrepreneurial mindset of young generation in India has already set to fire. The risk taking capabilities, the desire to do something new, the compassion to do something for country and the country men, to show the world that “It can very much happen in India” attitude of our new generation is becoming a blessing for the technological revolution in India.

India has magnitude of IT professionals who has been part of IT journey from the then most legacy systems of 80’s till the latest technologies of 20’s. Many of them are data scientists and AI engineers and a huge mass has already skilling themselves into data science. Producing more and more data scientists in India is very easy compared to any other country as our engineers are already been grownup in an IT environment, so turning them into decent data scientists is a matter of only few months. Secondly, any technical training be it AI is very cheap and easily accessible in India. We have numerous forums to mentor our young entrepreneurs and aspiring AI professionals. Many of our premier educational institutes provides latest curriculum in data science and AI. So India in fact has a conductive environment for AI to flourish better than any other country of the world. India is already an IT powerhouse and in other words an IT Superpower and it has got tremendous potential to come top in the race of AI Superpowers.