Maximizing Impact & Scale - Making AI Real

The theme for the 3rd NASSCOM XperienceAI Virtual Summit, 'Making AI Real' aimed to delve into conversations to show the real impact of AI and the value it can create from an enterprise and society lens. On August 9, we discussed one of the two key focus areas for the summit - Maximizing Impact and Scaling Adoption.

Here, we have gathered valuable takeaways from our sessions on AI for Impact, Citizens, Scale and Technology in this article.

AI for Impact | Morning Episode

The day began with Debjani Ghosh , President, nasscom as she kickstarted the 3rd #NASSCOMXperienceAI Virtual Summit and shared the key insights on how the #Techade belongs to AI and how it is being shaped by it. She also talked about the interdependence of AI and data and the need to have an end-to-end data strategy for organisations to make the most of AI.

Following the opening session, Srikanth Velamakanni , Co-Founder, Group Chief Executive, and Executive Vice Chairman, Fractal joined for an exclusive keynote - The Second Half of the Chessboard and used an interesting analogy of a chess board to discuss the importance of ethics for AI leaders and a lot more.

In a session with some brilliant takeaways discussing the speed at which Artificial General Intelligence is transforming, Dr. Hannah Fry , British Mathematician, Best Seller Author & Professor, Mathematics of Cities, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, 英国伦敦大学学院 spoke about how little data over time can provide massive insights that can be used to understand a lot of phenomena like the occurrence of breast cancer, the birth of more male children during a war, and more. However, she emphasised that along with this, what is also important are the set of questions we are asking.?

We next had Ankush Sabharwal , Founder & CEO, CoRover , Ganesh Gopalan , CEO & Co-founder, gnani.ai and Sanjay Kukreja , Global Head of Technology, eClerx for a discussion on Decluttering the Noise: Decoding Vernacular NLP. The leaders shared some real-use cases that showed how we can succeed with the technology. They also talked about how Conversational AI platforms need to be more human-centric, as more virtual assistants, chatbots, voice assistants, and video bots become the norm. They touched upon the need for making solutions for all, keeping accessibility in mind.

In the next session on Drone Tech AI for the Next Billion, Vipul Singh , Co-Founder & CEO, AEREO shared his insights on how AI and drones can work together to increase value creation and shared some of the use cases where drone tech and AI can create impact for the next billion.

Next up was another intriguing session by Jay Theodore , Chief Technology Officer, Esri who joined us to talk about Geospatial and AI: The new, the now and the next. He highlighted the multitude of challenges that we are facing and how AI-infused GIS can be a game changer for a host of services ranging from mapping and location to analytics and imagery.

We were then joined by Lt Gen Dr SP Kochhar , Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India - COAI to talk about 5G+AI empowering new tech innovations. He explained how 5G is the first technology which will enable machines to talk to human beings and vice versa. He also spoke about an exciting future ahead for India where 5G and industry 4.0 are coming together and how both can mutually benefit from each other.

In the session Fueling Innovation, Driving Results, Measuring Impact: An Enterprise Lens, Naren Peri , Asst. Vice President, Business Analytics, Site Leader, Global Analytics and Research Center (GARC), MetLife , Serge de Vos , Global Director, Interaxis (an 安海斯 - 布希英博 Venture) and Ankur Puri , Partner, 麦肯锡 shared the importance of defining measurement metrics of business impact through AI. They also emphasised on the role of AI in understanding the customer and furthering the importance of segmentation in targeting.

We then had Rohit Prabhakar , Chief Growth Officer, EQ Holdings and Prof Laxminarayanan G , Sr Vice President and Global Delivery Head, Polestar Solutions & Services to discuss the Science behind Marketing: Assessing the Role of AI. They spoke about the impact AI can create in modern marketing, the roadblocks, and some possible solutions. They emphasised how in the evolution of marketing over time, while technology may have become the brain, it won’t take over as creativity still lies with the humans.

For the last session of the morning episode, we were joined by Tanmaya Jain , Founder, inFeedo who spoke about Transforming Employee Experience with Conversational AI. In a shocking revelation, Tanmaya shared that 58% of employees would trust a stranger more than their own manager, but an AI-powered ‘Chief Listening Officer’ could help bridge the gap between higher management and employees.

AI for Citizens at Scale | Afternoon Episode

The afternoon episode began with a session on AI Accelerating India’s Digital Health Journey, as we were joined by Dr. Dr. RS Sharma , CEO, National Health Authority (NHA) , MoHFW (Govt. of India) and Rostow Ravanan (he/him) , Chairman and CEO, Alfahive Inc. They shared the importance of building inclusive and scalable open frameworks which is the key to making systems scalable.

Col. Dr Pankaj Dikshit, Ph D (IIT Delhi) , Senior Vice President (IT), Goods And Services Tax Network and Ashish Aggarwal , Vice President, Public Policy, NASSCOM joined us for the next session on Analytics and AI’s Impact on Tax Collection: GSTN. Col. Dikshit shared how a robust AL/Ml based analytics system for GST is helping the taxpayers as well as tax collection & analytics.

Financial Inclusion is one of the key priorities for our nation. To talk about it, we were joined by Praveena Rai , Chief Operating Officer, National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) . Praveena shared key insights on risk management and how AI can play a very important role by helping predict a transaction that is not kosher.

Following this session, we were joined by an extremely interesting duo to talk about AI for Sustainability: Time for Action: Reduce, Reuse and Rethink. Marc Zornes , Co-Founder, Winnow Solutions, LLC and Anantha Sekar , Artificial Intelligence CoE Lead, 塔塔咨询服务公司 candidly talked about using computer vision models to identify food wastage and the importance of data to help build sustainable solutions.

Post this, we had Praveen Pankajakshan , PhD, VP, Data Science and AI, Cropin and Ankit Bose , Head of AI, NASSCOM sharing their thoughts on AI Driven Agri-Value Chain. Praveen shared how the absorption of organic carbon & CO2 during the crop lifecycle in a way makes our farmers actual climate heroes. He further added that farmers should be given carbon credits as incentives for their work and the market and society should move away from yield-related value for farmers.

For the last session of the afternoon episode, AI for Society, Providing Solutions for Betterment, Atul Rai , Co-founder & CEO, Staqu Technologies , Ranjeet Deshmukh , Founder, RoadBounce and Gopali Raval Contractor , MD, Cloud First, Advanced Technology Centers in India, 埃森哲 took the stage. They talked about how privacy and security have a fine line in between and how companies should be careful to not overstep it while designing citizen-centric solutions to curb crime using AI and the bright future ahead with AI for society.

It’s All Tech | Evening Episode

Sudeep George , VP of Engineering, iMerit Technology and Prashanth Seshadri , Group Manager - Data Science, Intuit joined us for a session on ML DataOps: Data-Centric Approach to Improve AI Efficiency.

They talked about how a data-centric approach can help represent the real world in which the AI model has to operate and for its good performance, we need to ensure that data is high quality, accurate and current.

For an exciting session on Decoding the Black Box: Explainable and Trustworthy AI, we were joined by Beena Ammanath , Executive Director, Global 德勤 AI Institute and Sangeeta Gupta , Sr VP & Chief Strategy Officer, NASSCOM. Beena shared important insights and was of the opinion that AI can truly take humanity to the next level but before that, it is important that the negative impacts and aspects are addressed proactively, especially by technologists.

For the last session of the day, AI Play in Advancing Neuroscience and Diagnostics, we were joined by Padma Shri Dr Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay , Director, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and Akhilesh Tuteja , Global Cyber Security Practice Co-leader, Head – Risk Consulting and Partner, KPMG India . Dr. Sanghamitra emphasised that data science is no magic, and that it is important to secure the right data and ask the right questions in order to achieve results.?

Conclusion

For this day, we had leaders talk about the value that AI can drive in attaining results for the enterprises and how it can gauge revenue impact. We saw discussions on how AI is impacting the population at scale and all of us are affected by big challenges, how AI can solve them for us, and what more is needed for us to collectively take action.

This year’s NASSCOM XperienceAI Virtual Summit saw the entire AI ecosystem come together to discuss building, regulating and implementing for necessary AI impact and attempted to answer questions on challenges and roadblocks.

August 9-10, 2022

https://nasscom.in/aisummit