India Well Positioned for AI-Led Economic Transformation: Assocham

With over 36 percent of large financial establishments investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven technologies and 70 percent planning to embrace it, India is well poised for AI-led economic transformation, a PwC India and Assocham report said on Friday.

Yet, While AI, Machine Learning (ML) and robotics have a wide range of use cases in financial services sector, their potential has not been fully realised in India, said the joint report.

"Establishing data access frameworks and guidelines for open application interfaces from financial institutions will act as an enabler for increased adoption of AI in the sector," the findings showed.

AI can be leveraged to protect economic sectors and infrastructure such as airports and power plants that are vulnerable to attacks.

"Anomalous behaviour detection in individuals and infrastructure disruption prediction (natural/ man-made causes) powered by the use of distributed sensors and pattern recognition are examples of AI usage potential in the sector," the report added.

Along with AI applications in defence, robots can be used to perform jobs which are unsafe for humans - such as recovering explosives, detecting mines, space exploration, deep water probes, scouting for hostile territories, etc.

AI-enabled cybersecurity systems rely on historical data of cyber-attacks and apply ML to predict and detect similar threats likely to arise in the future. Having automated systems in place for monitoring and detecting risks helps to free up human agents from the time-consuming tasks of having to continually check and categorise these red flags based on their threat level, said the report.

AI-enabled assistive technology for differently abled individuals is an untapped market in India.

"AI, in combination with other emerging technologies like 3D printing and IoT, has great potential to fuel widespread availability, affordability and feasibility of innovations in smart prosthetics," said the report.

"Forming cooperative relationships with some of the front-runners in AI - such as Japan, the UK, Germany, Singapore, Israel, and China - to develop solutions that tackle social and economic challenges can aid and accelerate strategy formulation," it added.

Policy planning in AI must be aimed at creating an ecosystem that is supportive of research, innovation and commercialisation of applications.

The centre and state governments could look at providing fiscal and non-fiscal incentives for AI research/ deployment, the report advised, adding that setting up centres of excellence supporting inter-disciplinary research can further fuel AI adoption in India.