AI is the fastest-growing technology in the world. Artificial intelligence is one of those transformation technologies that is well-poised to address global challenges like affordability and accessibility of quality healthcare, education, and automobile solutions. For India, AI has been a pioneering technology that has helped the country combat major challenges like the Covid-19 pandemic. Several Indian companies are leveraging advanced technologies like AI, ML, deep learning, and NLP, to name a few, to contribute to the advancement of the tech industry of the country. Over the past couple of years, the growth of Indian AI companies has been exponential.

AI has become intertwined with every aspect of our lives. Each one of us is currently using this technology in one form or the other. From personal digital assistants like Siri, google assistant, Alexa, to self-driving cars, it's being used very widely. The use is increasing on a daily basis in fast growing sectors such as healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and manufacturing. Also, businesses like Swiggy and Zomato, which have invested heavily in AI over the past couple of years, have witnessed the power of technology to both sustain and increase growth.

India's AI tech leaves something to be desired. Ironically, a sizable chunk of engineers working for tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are Indians. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has ranked India as the seventh-largest economy, down from the sixth position in 2020 and fifth in 2019. The relegation is chalked up to the pandemic crisis. Now, with the rising number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, India's future looks bleak.

Indian companies are betting big on artificial intelligence as they see disruption amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Indian companies have adapted to artificial intelligence faster than their counterparts in the US, UK and Japan, a PwC research said. Amidst the global pandemic, India has noted the highest increase in the use of AI as compared to major economies (the US, UK and Japan), the PwC research said Many Indian companies saw their supply chains getting disrupted as India decided to opt for a lockdown to contain the Covid pandemic. For several companies this meant that they had to come up with fresh strategies around manufacturing and supplying goods. "Indian organisations are firm in their resolve to combat the challenges of the pandemic, with the manufacturing sector reconfiguring traditional practices to automate value chain processes and the Government engaging with technology firms to solve problems in the new normal (e.g. Similarly, universities, start-ups and the healthcare sector have developed AI-powered diagnostic guidance systems to help patients and models to predict the spread of the virus," the PwC research said.

A unit increase in artificial intelligence (AI) intensity by Indian firms can result in a 2.5% increase in India's GDP in the immediate term, claims report launched by National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) in collaboration with Google and think tank ICRIER. The research findings are from a study titled "Implications of AI on the Indian Economy." AI intensity is measured as the ratio of AI to total sales of the firm. In the absence of a direct measure of AI at the firm level, the model uses investments in software, databases and computer machinery as a proxy for AI. The results of the model find a positive and significant relation between AI using firms and growth in total factor productivity (TFP), said the organisations. However, as per the study, the current rate of growth in AI investments is unlikely to increase the levels of AI intensity adequately.

In the past two years, Swiggy, the Naspers, DST Global and Bessemer Ventures-funded restaurant aggregator, has been on a tear. The number of interactions on its platform since October 2017 has gone from 2 billion (across consumers, riders and restaurants) to 40 billion in January 2019. In that time, Swiggy has gone from a business working with 12,000 restaurants to over 55,000; from seven cities to 70; from delivery staff of 15,000 to 120,000. The Bengaluru-based venture has become far more valuable, too -- from $700 million in February 2018 to $3.3 billion by the end of the year. This dizzying growth has meant that Swiggy, a firm founded as recently as 2014, has to look beyond human intervention to keep pace.

The basis of GDPR is the privacy of data for citizens and consumers of EU countries and the methods needed to track and enforce GDPR will need to have intelligent methods to process the large amount of data that will need to be sorted to identify GDPR compliance or non-compliance. According to Dr. Shane Archiquette, CTO – Global Communications, Media & Entertainment, Global Markets and Technology Architecture, AI-assisted auditing will most likely be the method used to look for patterns across multiple disparate datasets that businesses will need to produce and process. In addition, AI will provide a composable method to machine-learn new areas that are identified by GDPR legal precedence as new cases are opened and closed. According to a recent report, European Union Institute researchers created AI-enabled software to scrutinize the privacy policies of 14 major technology companies for violations of the new GDPR. They found that 1/3 rd of the clauses contained "insufficient information," with 11% of the policies' sentences using "unclear language."

In 2010, I hired two engineers from an Indian college to help me develop a product that could automatically grade the spoken English ability of job applicants. About a year later, they knocked on my office door with concern etched on their brows. "We are doing machine learning here, but all our friends are doing software engineering," they explained. "Do we have a future?" Most businesses have a top-down mandate to incorporate AI into their processes and products.

Infosys and its local rivals in India are some the largest IT outsourcers on the planet, and definitely the biggest in any emerging market. If you include New Jersey-based Cognizant in the mix, cofounded by Lakshmi Narayanan from Tata Consultancy, then six of the biggest IT services companies in the world are run by Indians. As it stands, five of the largest IT consultancies call India home. That's more than China, more than Ireland and France, and only two less than the United States if you consider the companies whose outsourcing practice is at the core of their business, like IBM for instance. India's biggest IT outsourcer of course is Tata Consultancy Services, ranked #404 on the Forbes Global 2000 list.

India and China have launched their first joint projects in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data. An AI-focused IT corridor was on Saturday launched by both countries in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, while on Sunday, a big data-focused IT cooperation platform was opened in the southwestern city of Guiyang. The two projects, backed by the Chinese government and India's National Association for Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), are aimed at boosting cooperation between Indian software companies and Chinese firms in high-tech manufacturing in big data and Internet of Things projects. India has sought greater market access for IT companies in China, and the hope is that the two new initiatives will further open the door. The idea is to "help in bringing together the IT requirements of Chinese companies, particularly in Guiyang, with Indian companies which have solutions to offer," Indian envoy to China Gautam Bambawale said on Sunday.