New Delhi, February 10 (IANS): At a time when the global technology giants are set to leverage the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for your daily lives -- from taking care of businesses to fulfilling your personal needs -- India seems to be reluctant to get on to this bus.
When Amit Singhal -- an India-born techie who joined Google nearly 15 years ago practically reigning at Google Search since then -- decided to quit this month and hand the baton over to the head of the technology giant’s artificial intelligence (AI) chief, the message was clear: AI was the future that had arrived.
Amid all the brouhaha over machines acquiring near-human intelligence, is India ready to embrace the change?
“For the Indian market, we might see some serious AI in action around 2020, and by 2025 there should be considerable advancements,” Faisal Kawoosa, lead analyst, Telecoms Practice, at market research and consulting firm CyberMedia Research (CMR), told IANS. According to Thomas George, SBU Head of CMR, there were several studies projecting AI becoming mainstream within five years. “However, this appears possible only in the high-end segments in the advanced and developed markets and not in India,” he added.
According to a latest forecast by the research firm MarketsandMarkets, the AI market is estimated to reach $5 billion by 2020 globally. “The increasing use of machine learning technology in the advertising and media and finance sectors, and the growing demand for AI across diversified application areas are driving the growth of the AI market,” the findings showed.
In India, the top-notch technology companies are yet to make a substantial progress into the business of AI. While Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has Ignio -- a neural science-based automation platform that optimises IT operations, Infosys has recently launched AiKiDo project that will focus on AI, knowledge-based IT and design thinking to help enterprise clients.
Wipro, on the other hand, has an AI platform “Holmes” -- a rich set of cognitive computing services for the development of digital virtual agents, cognitive process automation, visual computing applications, robotics and drones. To fulfill its AI dreams, Wipro recently acquired a strategic stake in Vicarious -- an AI company based in San Francisco, California.
But this does not seem enough when it comes to the practical application of AI in the country on a large scale. “Although industry circles have been talking about AI for more than a decade, it is yet to make its mark in India,” George said. Globally, Microsoft, Google and Facebook are leading the way when it comes to incorporating AI into the workplace -- transforming the experience of “machine learning” via “deep neural networks” of hardware and software that nearly approximate neurons in the human brain.
