Is AI a Luxury Technology? Will AI based Solutions be affordable to common man?
Artificial Intelligence based Technologies are not luxury or costly to that matter. Most of the Open Source and Pre-Cast Technologies are available for anyone’s consumption. The challenge is with the skilled workforce and their affordability. As of 2020, the professional community that knows industry standards of AI Design and Implementation is below 10% of the total tech workforce. Once this human resource gap converts into abundance, then AI is everywhere. So AI Upskilling and Reskilling should be on highest priority for every nation.
Can AI Disrupt the Classrooms and Reshape Education as a whole?
Definitely, it will, it should and it ought to. We have seen such disruptions in the Retail, Banking, and Entertainment worlds in the last decade where every User involved in the transaction had a totally different experience compared to the Physically Operated Business. Today Amazon, Venmo, Paytm and Netflix kind of services have completely replaced the traditional models and consumer adoption is very fast as these models have brought in the comfort and ease of getting the same or even better experience than before.
Similarly, newer models will arrive in the Education world starting 2021, as the pandemic has completely hit the Education World, compromising the learning experiences for every age group. As this situation is going to continue for a few years from now or even this whole decade, there is a need to adopt AI & Automation into the Classrooms and School Operations.
A typical AI-Driven school can be imagined with Teaching Assistant Bots, Chat Bots assisting classrooms, exams, homework, etc, and measuring the Presence, Participation, and Performance of the student and teacher community.
Where can we see India standing in Global AI race by 2030? Do we have it to become the Leader in this opportunity?
India is the youngest country in the world. With 60% of its population between 15-45 years of age, the human resource power we carry is unmatchable to any nation. This strength has to be cultivated in the right direction. AI has to be introduced from the High School level with Solution driven academics in place. Every college, university, and educational institution should become an R&D Hub and start working on solving local to global problems.
For this to happen, Design Mindset plays a key role. India has focussed on being a Sales and Service Hub for decades, Now we are marching towards becoming a Manufacturing Hub with the Make in India initiative.
I would recommend we also simultaneously initiate “Design (AI) in India” initiative which should aim at promoting the Disruptive Creators Mindset and Innovations for domestic and world consumption.
This will eventually drive a few trillion dollars into our economy and raising the GDP
What is the role of AI in the COVID Hit MSMEs facing Workforce and Skill Challenges?
COVID had the worst hit on the MSME world. Global economy majorly runs on these industries. Today blue-collar labor have completely scattered during the lockdowns and are fearing to return to their original work locations due to pandemic fears. This has created a surge in shortage of skilled labour in the local industrial hubs across the countries.
Rapid Training needs, Work management and Facility & Production Monitoring within the MSMEs is a big challenge for the owners.
My recommendation is to create local AI Hubs for MSME Industrial Estates, who will work closely with the owners of these industries and create and deploy customised solutions to their business operations. Commercially Off the Shelf (COTS) solutions cannot fit the needs of this class of the industry.
This is a huge revenue potential for the young engineers, software professionals to create their own Industrial IoT & AI Ops facilities.
Remote Machine Operations through Predictive and Prescriptive AI is one of the fast requirement in this space.
Citizen-Centric Governance can be enabled only when any government can sense, analyze and innovate according to the needs of the people. Sensing & Analysing is the core of this game and technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Data Science can do this job at a scale. This is already happening in the country at various levels and formats.
There is a long way to go and implement these solutions across the verticals of the governance and integrating and enabling interoperability of these verticals through cross-pollinating the data and insights from every operational wing of the government.
We have seen such implementations happen in Singapore in their Smart Nation initiative which is reaping great results.
This is the right time and opportunity for every nation and its leadership to adopt these strategies, technologies and building blocks to digitally transform their peoples lives.
How can India benefit out of AI?
For a country of India’s size and scale, we need a different approach in enabling AI kind of technologies into governance.
For the kind of diversity India possesses, the variety of data and dimensions it can supply is equal to 3 continents put together (Northern America, Europe, and Australia).
Young minds, Professors, Government, and Industry experts can start to work on these data sets that can reveal loads of hidden insights and strategy for development of the nation.
How do you plan to work on this front in the near and far future?
SOIL - School of Innovation and Leadership is extending its interest for partnered efforts in this space towards re-imagining, re-designing, and re-creating our lives after the worst catastrophe the World has ever experienced.
We are on a mission to create 200 Startups (products, solutions, ventures) that can solve the problems that evolved in the pandemic across every industry vertical and lifestream in this decade, thus creating economy and employment small-big through the ecosystem efforts.
IN-CUBE | SOIL | AIJ and our upcoming solutions are born with digital DNA and Pandemic Immunity following the 6D Problem Solving Framework.
What is your solution or recommendations to overcome the Pandemic Economy? That Phoenix Mantra?
Create-to-Learn campuses, labs, and pedagogy is the fast, efficient, and cost-effective way to prepare the Talent, Products, Ventures for the world to revive and fly back as a Phoenix from the pandemic ashes. This is the Phoenix Mantra from now on to revive quick with new thinking, dna and life altogether.
Agri-Tech, Ed-Tech, Fin-Tech, Health-Tech, and Gov-Tech Innovation should be the current focus areas for every nation and government.
We bet that Gov-Tech is going to be a major concentration for Futuristic AI-Driven Solutions coming into action and enabling far better governance in any territory across the world.