With the increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across every line of businesses, Rajeev Singh, India Head of Corporate, SAP Indian Subcontinent said AI will be a necessity and not a choice for organisations in times to come and that it will be an integral part of every business. In an interaction with this newspaper on the sidelines of the SAP NOW AI Tour in Mumbai, Singh also said that any AI strategy should be holistic in nature and that it should not be restricted to one particular area of business.
Organisations should look at AI holistically, he said. “Today, if you are not ready to keep AI in your transformational story, you are way behind. First, you need to be on cloud as it gives you AI power, and secondly, for AI to be successful your data has to be clean as AI trains on data and it is extremely critical,” he noted. Singh said cloud adoption is accelerating rapidly among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India.
Nearly 80% of SAP's customer base in India is in the SME segment. In a recent survey, SAP found that Indian midmarket businesses are prioritising the implementation of Gen AI (96%), compared with 91% globally. For SAP, which posted its first quarter earnings recently, cloud revenue performance was strong in India. Talking about trends that they are seeing, specifically on AI adoption, he said organisations are now looking at predictive forecasting.
“They are looking at automated job descriptions, sales and supply orders to be created automatically. We are seeing the technology shift coming to a position that every line of business is getting technology intertwined with business processes,” he said. Now, in this era, one cannot have a business process running without using technology within that. “It is not that processes are running and then we put an IT system on top of it. I think if you’re doing that, you are just dead as an organisation. Every line of businesses like HR head, supply chain executives - all are looking at what AI can do for them,” he explained.
Singh pointed out that tier-2 and tier-3 cities have grown very fast for them. SAP also revealed in its new analysis that the most popular AI use cases in India are AI-generated visual insights, summaries and translations, AI-assisted process analysis, creating sales orders from unstructured data, predictive forecasting, and natural language queries. Manish Prasad, president and managing director, SAP Indian Subcontinent, said 23% of the world's public cloud customers are in India and that 25% of customers are simplifying their tech landscape.
“We have already developed close to 210 AI use cases that we are using across different functions of our customers’ business,” he said. Speaking at the same event, Simon Davies, president SAP APAC, said that India is one of the growth engines for SAP and that they see the fastest adoption of public cloud and fastest adoption in the mid-market, driven by growth in economy and huge opportunities in the country.