AI from India, for the world

When I was on the managing board of Siemens India, India was the global benchmark for offshoring. Today, I'm witnessing a country that has everything it needs to become an AI leader and powerhouse. I expect India will not only develop its very own AI capabilities, it will also export AI services and AI innovation. Here is why.

The desert is a harsh place. If you didn’t know, desert sand can stop a cog from turning, corrode the inside of an engine, and even make entire roads disappear.

One of our customers in the Middle East, a large oil and gas producer, operates wells, heavy machinery and specialist vehicles in remote parts of a desert. And the sandstorms they face can be fierce, often causing sand accumulations on critical sites, resulting in significant financial damage to the company. It can take days to locate the exact spots where the damage happened.

Innovation developed in India

My 西门子 colleague and AI expert, Chethan Seegehalli and his team in Bengaluru developed an AI application that predicts these sand accumulations. They trained an AI model with historical satellite images of the customer’s critical sites. Then they cross-referenced the images with weather data. This gave the AI the data it needed to calculate how and where future weather patterns would affect their operations.

Today, the model developed by Chethan, and his team can predict the area, volume and frequency of sand accumulations seven days in advance – and with more than 70% accuracy. This allows our customer to allocate resources for clean ups in advance, which can reduce costs by more than 20%.

The AI model is now part of our Siemens Xcelerator platform and can be adapted by other customers around the world: perhaps in a different desert, with a different type of sand, or even in a place with snow.

The future and what it means for India

For these types of industrial AI applications, we already see strong demand. And India, with its vast talent pool of software developers and engineers, fast-growing diversified industries and government support, is well-positioned not only to adopt this technology but also to deliver it to the rest of the world.

The country is on track to become a $7 trillion economy by 2030, and it has people power: 65% of Indians are under 35. Many of them speak English, and for many of them AI is already part of their lives, a bit like email for the generation before them. On top of this India has a thriving start up culture and the highest number of AI research institutions globally.

The government is also investing strategically in AI education and labs – and not just in the biggest cities. The countrywide initiative IndiaAI is meant to make AI accessible to everyone.

All the ingredients are there. And the investments are flowing: our partners Microsoft and Amazon, for example, are collectively planning to invest over $16.4 billion in data centres and cloud infrastructure in India by 2030.

Siemens also recently invested in a new Centre of Competence for the Asia-Pacific region in Chennai where over 200 professionals are working on innovations for data centres. They join Chethan and his 34,000 colleagues who work for Siemens in India. More than 10,000 of them are software engineers. They support Siemens teams and customers all over the world, with smart products including the app that predicts sandstorms.

Local talent is the key to developing and scaling AI in India, and the government has launched several initiatives, including the Skill India program, to build up a pipeline of digital talent. We have also launched dozens of educational initiatives across India in thousands of schools, universities and workplaces, to skill the workforce of tomorrow. We have trained some 175,000 young people in digital technologies including robotics and automation over the past 10 years. They are part of India’s future success in AI.

Knowledge exchange and collaboration with other countries and within the wider region are now critical for India to keep up the pace. The Asia-Pacific Conference of German Business in New Delhi in October is one occasion on which German businesses hope to strengthen their collaboration with India in the areas of technology and AI.

The world has great AI models, and they are becoming better by the day. But for AI to be truly useful, we need to use it in the real world to create value. We need to apply and scale it in industry and across other sectors including infrastructure and healthcare. These are big tasks. We need talent and an infrastructure that are ready for it: India is the place to bring industrial AI to the next level.

This article was published in The Economic Times on 08/10/2024