BENGALURU: Businesses across industries are in the midst of a massive digital transformation. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become mainstream and organisations of all types and sizes are adopting a holistic approach to AI. In an interaction with TNIE, Teja Manakame, vice-president – IT, Dell Technologies, said the emergence of Generative AI provides even greater potential for businesses to extract value from their large data sets.
“In a world driven by increasingly massive amounts of data, AI is key to unlocking value within data and, thus, is becoming one of the most important tools for businesses,” she said. Conversational AI can help have human-like conversations. For instance, the tech support industry can leverage intelligent bots to replace human interactions thus saving costs.
Some other sectors where AI has great potential are product development and research, medical research, customer analysis and automation of business processes, among other things. At Dell Technologies, currently, every major product line utilises machine intelligence as a core component of a modern product development or solution. Dell has close to 1,000 AI/ML related projects going on at any time.
Talking about skilling employees on AI, Manakame said employees need to learn, develop, and use AI based solutions. Adoption of AI requires upskilling or reskilling, both of which are major requirements for companies.
“As most business users will leverage AI/Gen AI based solutions, it is pertinent that every person in the organisation has a basic knowledge of AI. This can be achieved through basic online courses or module-based training. AI professionals/ developers should acquire key skills such as a solid foundation in machine learning, proficiency in data science, mastery of programming languages like Python and R, and domain-specific knowledge,” she stated.
When it comes to AI, security plays an important role. With increasing concerns regarding security, businesses and their IT organisations have a responsibility to protect both their own and their customers’ data and privacy.
“A critical element of this responsibility is ensuring the entire infrastructure is secure and up-to-date, to minimise the risk of data breaches and cyber-attacks, all the while maintaining compliance. AI as a technology area does not operate in isolation from other major domains such as privacy, data, cloud, and security. Our AI work is focused on both core innovation and making it enterprise grade. In fact, most of our work is on sorting out the controls related to personal and confidential data, regulation, intellectual property rights,” she said.