TENKASI: Zoho Corp chief executive Sridhar Vembu urged central government to develop indigenous capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) and prevent monopoly in the field. Speaking to the press in Tenkasi town of Tamil Nadu, where he’s based at, Vembu said, India should start making efforts to catch up in developing technology and lay out a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence (AI).
He and two other industry representatives have written an open letter to the Union government regarding this. However, he didn’t specify the names. “We have to create a common pool to develop AI and it needs industry, academia and government collaboration - to build, develop and control a democratic AI and regulate privacy and data.”
“Digital public goods like UPI and ONDC should be developed for AI and India is a pioneer in this area. ONDC is an effort to prevent monopoly tax and we’re participating in that.” He said it is not too late for India to start developing AI capabilities.
As per him, AI revolution will create economic disruption, especially in the software industry and Zoho has to reinvent itself to sustain longer. The SaaS company has changed its logo to reflect this transformation. “AI going to increase the productivity but that doesn’t mean software industry will benefit from that.” The firm has nearly 60-70 engineers, out of the 250 R&D team, tinkering on the AI-based entreprise applications and not focusing on consumer AI.
“AI will increase the productivity of programmers by 100 times and the first jobs that AI will pose threat is software developers. I’ve been saying this for the last five years. Programming is like weaving today and AI is like a powerloom and that’s the disruption I see,” he added.
The downstream effects of adopting technologies like AI without due diligence and appropriate safeguards can cause unprecedented disruption of the existing social order, the open letter read. Zoho is expanding its footprint in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.