NEW DELHI: IBM is working with the Indian government on a slew of projects in the artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductor space. Elaborating on the collaboration with the Indian government in the AI space, Sandip Patel, managing director of IBM India & South Asia, said that the company has signed an explicit MoU with the government through India.ai, which covers training and skilling people in the domain of AI.
IBM is also in discussion with the CBSE to bring in AI curriculum into the formative years of high school education. It has also signed an MoU with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Under the MoU with the government, India’s supercomputing project AIRAWAT will integrate IBM’s WatsonX AI tool. Talking to the media during its annual IBM Think event in Mumbai recently, Sandip Patel said IBM has collaborated with L&T Semiconductor Technologies for R&D to design advanced processors. Patel said this is part of the company’s commitment to the Indian government to establish partnership with Indian companies that are going to get into fab manufacturing.
Patel expressed his happiness that India enterprises are outshining their global counterparts when it comes to adopting AI.
“We recently did a survey on AI adoption globally, and 59% of Indian enterprises, which is the highest across all the markets that we looked at, reported that they are deploying AI in some way,” said Patel in his address, praising India’s efforts on AI adoption.
According to Patel, many Indian enterprises have moved from experimentation stage to scaling AI across their influence. Though he says scaling up AI usage is the right business imperative to focus on, there are several challenges that come in the way of doing that.
And to address these challenges, Patel says the AI tools that enterprises are using must pass three tests – practicality, sustainability and seamless infusion of AI in day-to-day operations.
“These very questions that are key for scaling responsible AI tools, and are clearly characterized by the five pillars of transparency, explainability, robustness, privacy and fairness,” Patel said.
Patel said IBM has been driving and scaling AI adoption in India through WatsonX, its commercial generative AI platform based on cloud. He says WatsonX helps build custom AI applications for businesses, manage data sources and accelerate responsible AI workflow, all on a single platform.
On the question of whether the US tech giant is behind the curve on launching a public AI Platform such as ChatGPT, Patel said IBM is an enterprise technology company which focuses on B2B, and it is not correct to compare its enterprise AI tools with B2C platforms like Open AI’s ChatGPT.
Patel reiterated that IBM WatsonX is an enterprise AI platform which has three components — Watson x dot data, which helps to organise data for the enterprise to be used effectively for AI solutions; Watsonx.ai which is a studio that enables people to build AI solutions across multitude of models, whether they are proprietary models or other models; and WatsonX.governance that enables enterprises to drive governance and responsible AI across their AI portfolio.
