BENGALURU: People and chain management is more difficult than technology. One can figure out economics, but ultimately it’s about people, projecting a vision, and galvanising and motivating them to get there, said co-founder and Chairman of Infosys Nandan Nilekani.
He was in a fireside chat with Executive Vice-President, Information and Digital Technology and Shell CIO Robbert van Rutten at ‘Changemakers of Tomorrow’ in Bengaluru on Tuesday.
Nilekani, the founding chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India -- which created Aadhaar, said, “In the public sector, infrastructure is truly at a population scale, and those learnings are invaluable. In the private sector, it’s about applying that to business and marketing problems. I am bullish on the potential for technology for transformation of societies. With scalable AI and energy transition, there are several opportunities for technology.”
On the lessons he learnt while making Aadhaar a reality, he said, “Trend is your friend. We designed it in 2009 as a digital ID system, which worked on the cloud, two years after AWS (Amazon Web Services) was launched. Our insight was that mobile internet would become cheap and allow one to do it securely.” On AI at the workplace, he said, “It’s all about change management.
How we get people on board, convince them about something and deal with insecurities. But AI comes with its own challenges, whether it’s a whole new class of cyber problems, hallucinations or biased software. We run the risk of ending up with another hotchpotch of technology. The challenge is how we design and architecture new AI capabilities for the future.”
On the responsibilities of a company, he said, “We should be in complete command over strategic assets. At the same time, the company’s leverage is higher when there is a network with a whole ecosystem of partners who have different knowledge, innovation and strengths.”
Giving the example of Aadhaar, he said, “We had a core set of people. We owned technology and architecture. We figured out how we can leverage the larger ecosystem around us. But we made sure that data flow was with us.” They had to do around half-a-million enrolments a day, and had 35,000 enrolment centres around the country.
“All enrolment had to be of the highest quality and transported securely back to our data centres for deduplication. It was a huge logistical supply chain of data,” he said.
He said AI’s functioning too is through data. “With global companies, there is an estate which has accumulated over 30-40 years. Never before has it been more important to organise data that is consumable by AI. Value of AI comes from the value of data. Value of data is how well it is organised, and reliable. That’s where the action is. There is a lot of data, whether it is upstream, drilling, retailing, data on supply chain and data on trading behaviour. All these can be amplified and enhanced. The question is how we plug everything together.”