NEW DELHI, June 5: IT Secretary S Krishnan on Friday dismissed concerns around artificial intelligence, urging the industry to seize the “opportunity” and deploy the technology across sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, and education to drive economic growth and improve lives.
Alluding to concerns about AI’s disruptive impact on the IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) sector, Krishnan emphasised that there is no reason to fear and that AI is a technology that India must embrace.
“This is a technology which we need to embrace. This is a technology wave that we need to ride…as a young country, with talent, as a country with understanding…,” he said, addressing an event to mark the 35th Foundation Day of the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI).
The government is focused on providing the necessary infrastructure, including compute power, foundational models, and data to enable startups and companies to develop and deploy home-grown solutions, Krishnan said.
“…our task as government is to make sure that the infrastructure to enable companies and startups to ride out the AI wave is provided, be it compute, models, data…and that is precisely the task we are engaged in,” he said.
True unlocking of value and income will occur once AI applications are fully integrated across various sectors of the economy, he said.
“People have to benefit, applications and solutions have to be developed and deployed, and once that is done, that is where truly the revenue will be, that is where people will make the money, that is where the incomes will be earned, and value will be unlocked,” he said.
Highlighting India’s growing global stature, Krishnan noted that the country currently ranks third in the Global AI Vibrancy Index.
“India’s opportunity fundamentally lies in the fact of how AI will actually get deployed across a number of sectors in the economy, in manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, education, how it gets deployed in governance in just about every sector and what difference it makes to the lives of people,” Krishnan said.
His remarks come at a time when rapid adoption of artificial intelligence has led to job-related anxieties and fuelled a larger debate around AI’s disruptive implications for traditional IT models. (PTI)
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