India needs legal infrastructure to lead in artificial intelligence, says study

New Delhi: In order to become a frontrunner in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), India should take the lead in establishing a legal infrastructure on its application, a study said here on Thursday. According to a recent Assocham-PwC joint study titled "Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth", an early public sector interest could trigger a spurt of activity in the AI field in India, instead of waiting for technology to reach a level where regulatory intervention becomes necessary. The study said a range of applications for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours like "Make in India", "Skill India" and others could range from crop insurance schemes, tax fraud detection, detecting subsidy leakage and security strategy. "If investments are made in the two initiatives without due cognisance of how Industry 4.0 (the next industrial revolution driven by robotic automation) may evolve with respect to demand for workforce size and skill sets, there is a possibility of ending up with capital-intensive infrastructures and assets that fall short of being optimised for automated operations and a large workforce skilled in areas growing beyond the need for manual intervention only," it added. Information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, the study said.