AI in India: Transforming Lives and Businesses for Good While AI has its fair share of drawbacks, the emerging technology is largely used to transform lives and businesses for good
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In 1955, Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Hertbert Simon created The Logic Theorist- the first artificial intelligence (AI) program- to prove mathematical theorems from Principia Mathematica. Close to 70 years later, AI is now being used to drive growth in industries such as healthcare, finance, retail, e-commerce, and manufacturing, and is expected to further transform these sectors over decades to come.
Case in point, AI in the Indian healthcare market is expected to reach USD 1.6 billion by 2025. Several start-ups, researchers and physicians have developed artificial intelligence models which can predict cancer months, even years before it develops. Reacting to one of the developed tools which detect breast cancer 'AI Mirai', business tycoon Anand Mahindra took to X and said, "If this is accurate, then AI is going to be of significantly more value to us than we imagined and much earlier than we had imagined."
While AI has its fair share of drawbacks, the emerging technology is largely used to transform lives and businesses for good. To shed light on this, Krishna Kumar (co-founder and CEO, Cropin), Ramprakash Ramamoorthy (director of AI research, ManageEngine, Zoho Corp) and Deo Saurabh (co-founder, We Founder Circle) joined a panel discussion at Entrepreneur Summit 2024, titled 'The Real World Impact of AI."
AI use cases are diverse- from creating music to testing safety in automobiles- and at every level. As of April 2024, there were close to 6,200 thousand AI start-ups in the country. And one such backer of emerging ventures in the space is We Founder Circle. For Deo Saurabh, "opportunity is endless" when developing AI and LLMs.
According to Zion Market Research, the global Agriculture AI market size is predicted to grow to 〜USD 7.1 billion by 2030. Against the backdrop of AI in agritech, Krishna Kumar is optimistic about using emerging technology to bridge the gap of the digital divide. "With AI, we create a grid around the planet of five by five kilometres. And with that we are able to give you the past, present, and future of the crop. So if you are doing a corn or a potato on that grid, what could be the real potential next season? What has been the trend in the last five years?" he shares. The start-up has collected around 0.5 billion records of these 500 crops, 10,000 varieties from 103 countries, which is helping them to build these niche internal models.
While start-ups are building their LLMs, are enterprises- small or large- open to adopting AI strategies? Ramprakash Ramamoorthy of ManageEngine and Zoho shares that there has been a shift in AI usage from marketing to sales conversations. Customers are now keen to know what AI strategies are and how well the suggestions will align with them. "After all the hype after LLMs, customers have also started asking about return on investments (ROI). They are saying "I'm paying USD 20 per person per month, how much am I getting back?" he shares.
New research by IBM found that about 59 per cent of enterprise-scale organizations (over 1,000 employees) in India have actively embedded AI in their businesses.
"If you're a company that is looking forward to getting ROI out of your AI investment, start with streamlining your processes. Once you streamline your processes, the data gets streamlined. Also, invest in existing dumb automation as AI cannot come and change things overnight. How much of dumb automation have you invested in? Then AI will have a proactive value on it," adds Ramamoorthy. He suggests a company benchmark on AI should be a 10 per cent improvement in the metric you're tracking, say reduction of service level standards (SLS), total number of tickets that you've solved in a month or increase in the uptime.
Down the road
Valued at USD 5.2 Billion in 2022 and USD 6.1 Billion in 2023, the Indian AI market is expected to touch USD 23.4 billion by 2032, at a CAGR of 18.20 per cent during 2024 - 2032.
"In the next couple of years, your life will be different," he adds. Market research agency Traxcn data revealed that total funding for Indian AI startups saw over 71 per cent dip in 2023. Nasscom data showed that Generative AI (GenAI) saw a lagged effect of the 'funding winter', with a decline seen in H12024. However, Saurabh is clear about betting on AI in the long run. "If you are building an AI-related company, be it enterprise or customer-facing, and have the correct understanding of that thing you are in the right area. Numbers may go down this or that month. That's okay, but long-run investment will happen," he shares. Recently, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, secured USD 6.6 Bn while globally recognized AI leader Andrew Ng made his first investment in the Indian market with healthcare start-up Jivi.
Kumar and Saurabh hint at the need for verticalization of AI products. "There are a lot of horizontal products that I'm seeing, but we'll see very vertical-focused products soon," said the latter. For the uninitiated, horizontal AI refers to generalized AI solutions that are suitable across multiple industries.
Kumar pins that verticalization will happen in the next two to four years. "Today, with horizontal products you are solving a key language. So you'll be solving some of the marketing problems or law problems. But I think the winner will be the guys sitting on this data today. You are crawling on the web to learn it, but whoever is sitting on that and building that mode will be very valuable tomorrow,' he concluded.
