Artificial Intelligence and Startup Ecosystem in India

We are seemingly joined by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan (their brand ambassador) during our visit to the BigBasket Offices to interview Subramaniam Mani, their Analytics Head. He believes that the major difference between the software and AI waves is that although India was slow to adopt software service as compared to America, this time around with the AI wave, adoption will be much faster and only slightly behind the leading countries. "This is the second wave. The software wave was 30 years ago. Folks in India realized that they've been able to scale software and I think AI / ML is an extension of software development." While software was often taught through books and in classrooms exclusively, many of the latest artificial intelligence approaches are available to learn online – along with huge suites of open-source tools (from scikit-learn to TensorFlow and beyond). Going in, we knew that one of the key advantages for India would, in fact, be the very IT and ITeS sectors which will make it easy for Indian tech providers to transition into AI services, given that well-developed ecosystems have evolved over the past 25 years in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad.