Marking a significant shift in India's digital journey, the Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, has presented the first-ever digital budget for the upcoming fiscal year starting April 2021. Her budget speech touched upon "proliferation of technologies, especially analytics, machine learning, robotics, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence." The budget has come at a time when the country is still struggling with the massive economic slowdown precipitated by COVID pandemic. However, despite this downturn, businesses have seen a significant push towards digitisation, including acknowledging the importance of artificial intelligence across industries. As a matter of fact, India is considered one of the fastest-growing digital markets globally.

Singapore is attracting the world's leading artificial intelligence talent because of its status as a cosmopolitan society and strong state backing for technology research, according to the head of the private equity firm building a mega hub in the city for start ups involved in the sector. Joel Ko, co-founder and chief executive of Marvelstone Ventures, said Alibaba's announcement last week that it would site one of its global AI research facilities in Singapore was a shot in the arm for the republic's ambitions to become a regional focal point for the fast growing industry. Singapore-based Marvelstone on Monday dovetailed the announcement by the Chinese conglomerate – owner of the South China Morning Post – by revealing it was setting up an AI hub of its own in the city state, which would incubate 100 start ups every year. It said its hub would be "the world's biggest" when it opens next year. The two facilities are independent of each other, but Ko said "there could be an opportunity for partnership and collaboration" with Alibaba and other technology giants.

TORONTO - IBM will be joining the fintech hub at Toronto's MaRS discovery district, becoming the first technology tenant in a space currently occupied by financial services companies. The technology giant will move into the hub in the coming weeks, joining the likes of CIBC, Manulife and payment processor Moneris. Adam Nanjee, who heads up the fintech cluster at MaRS, says the so-called C Suite is meant to act as a bridge between larger corporations and tech-savvy startups. For companies, the fintech hub provides opportunities to partner with startups working on cutting-edge, potentially disruptive technologies. These partnerships have the potential to lead to investments and acquisition offers -- a huge benefit for the startups.