The government-promoted bad bank National Asset Reconstruction Company of India Ltd (NARCL) last week offered to acquire five distressed loan accounts, including those of Future Retail and GTL Ltd, said two people aware of the development. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is considering a plan to allow Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) to extend by two more years the lifecycle of investment products that are set to be wound up, said people with direct knowledge of the matter. The MSCI India index--a benchmark for global fund managers to assess the country's investment performance--now has a valuation premium of 96% and 39% over the MSCI Emerging Markets and the MSCI World indices, respectively. Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News. Taking a leaf from Titan's jewellery playbook, Lenskart has grown fast.

AI-powered video analytics start-up CattleEye is in a field of its own having won the Irish leg of KPMG's Global Tech Innovator Competition. Belfast-based tech start-up CattleEye has won the top prize at KPMG's tech innovator competition, which saw entrants from all over Ireland. CattleEye uses AI-powered video analytics to keep an eye on cows. The start-up's CEO Terry Canning impressed the panel of judges, who also heard from eight other business people hoping to be crowned Ireland's top tech innovator. Canning's CattleEye will now progress to KPMG's Global Tech Innovator competition, which will be held at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

The banking industry is beginning to embrace AI and digital assets in an effort to put in place cutting-edge detection and to reduce human workload. To keep up with the pace of business and the security threats in today's environment, financial institutions were compelled to improve efficiency and develop innovative safeguards to manage risk. Fintech made that possible, and its adoption by users has accelerated tremendously as a result of the pandemic. "Fintech is the biggest disruptor of our time for financial institutions," declared KPMG. "If you look at digital lenders that have manufactured fintech products for at least a decade, they're doing quite a bit with AI. The idea of underwriting someone's credit sits very well with an AI approach."

Kirke Everson is a principal in KPMG's Federal Advisory practice, focusing on technology enablement, intelligent automation, program management, process improvement, cyber security, risk management, and financial management. He currently serves as the government lead for Intelligent automation for KPMG in the U.S. Federal and state government leaders are witnessing the expansion of artificial intelligence all around them. From back-office automation, that can help reduce backlogged work, to cognitive platforms, that can identify and respond to natural language requests to better serve the public, AI and automation has become a driving force in addressing mission and business objectives. Based on the use cases they described, it's clear that agencies are making significant headway in putting AI to work. At the same time, there a variety of issues where government CIOs also need broader support. The issues they and their executive teams face, in many ways, are not that different from previous technology breakthroughs that tended to upend familiar work processes.

Amid the many business disruptions caused by covid-19, here's one largely overlooked: artificial intelligence (AI) whiplash. As the pandemic began to upend the world last year, businesses reached for every tool at their disposal--including AI--to solve challenges and serve customers safely and effectively. In a 2021 KPMG survey of US business executives conducted between January 3 and 16, half the respondents said their organization sped up its use of AI in response to covid-19--including 72% of industrial manufacturers, 57% of technology companies, and 53% of retailers. Most are happy with the results. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed agree AI has been helpful to their organization during the pandemic, and a majority say it is delivering even more value than anticipated.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of artificial intelligence adoption, and healthcare leaders are confident AI can help solve some of today's toughest challenges, including COVID-19 tracking and vaccines. The majority of healthcare and life sciences executives (82%) want to see their organizations more aggressively adopt AI technology, according to a new survey from KPMG, an audit, tax and advisory services firm. Healthcare and life sciences (56%) business leaders report that AI initiatives have delivered more value than expected for their organizations. However, life sciences companies seem to be struggling to select the best AI technologies, according to 73% of executives. As the U.S. continues to navigate the pandemic, life sciences business leaders are overwhelmingly confident in AI's ability to monitor the spread of COVID-19 cases (94%), help with vaccine development (90%) and aid vaccine distribution (90%).

According to a new report by KPMG, "Thriving in an AI World," industry leaders may be experiencing an effect that the company is calling "COVID-19 whiplash" after a year of highly accelerated technology adoption. Specifically, 55 percent of business leaders in industrial manufacturing and 49 percent in retail and tech told KPMG that "AI is moving faster than it should in their industry." Moreover, these concerns are exceedingly pronounced within the section of leaders from small companies at 63 percent, leaders with high levels of AI knowledge at 51 percent and by Gen Z and Millennial business leaders at 51 percent. Notably, many business leaders with interest in AI implementation said COVID-19 has influenced their company's plans to adopt the technology and contributed to a quicker pace of adoption, including 53 percent from retail, 57 percent from tech, 72 percent from industrial manufacturing, and 37 percent from healthcare and life sciences. "Just one year ago, [our report] signaled on all accounts that AI was starting to have real impact across industries, yet industry leaders told us that they felt it was not being implemented fast enough," said Traci Gusher, principal of artificial intelligence at KPMG. "Fast forward to today, industry leaders are telling us they are experiencing what we at KPMG are calling COVID-19 whiplash, with AI adoption literally skyrocketing as a result of the pandemic. Now, Industry leaders are saying it's moving too fast."

Real-world AI deployments surged over the past year as companies sought to remain competitive during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study released today by KPMG. However, even as they expanded and accelerated their AI projects, organizations expressed concerns about ethics and bias, and suggested AI might be getting ahead of regulations. KPMG's study, called "Thriving in an AI World," replicates a study conducted before COVID-19 upended our world a year ago. That provided KPMG Principal of AI, Traci Gusher, a convenient baseline to test how AI deployments have been impacted by COVID-19. "Over half the business leaders that we talked to said that AI is at least moderately to fully functional in their organization, which is a significant increase," Gusher says.

A survey published by KPMG today suggests that a large number of organizations have increased their investments in AI during the pandemic to the point that executives are now concerned about moving too fast. In fact, most of the survey respondents cited a definite need for increased AI regulation. The survey covered 950 business decision-makers and/or IT decision-makers with at least a moderate amount of AI knowledge at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue. It finds AI technologies are most likely to be moderately to fully employed in industrial manufacturing (93%), financial services (84%), technology (83%), retail (81%), life sciences (77%), health care (67%), and government (61%) sectors. Survey respondents all cited the pandemic as a factor that drove increased adoption of AI in the last year, though the degree varied by sector from industrial manufacturing (72%) to technology (57%), retail (53%), government (44%), financial services (42%), and health care and life sciences (37%). Many respondents also noted that AI technology is moving too fast for their comfort in industrial manufacturing (55%), technology (49%), retail (49%), life sciences (47%), financial services (37%), government (37%), and health care (35%) sectors.

There are various studies on different topics of artificial intelligence. Many renowned institutes and companies deal with the various aspects and technologies and the corresponding effects on companies. One of KPMG's highly relevant and highly topical studies on this topic is presented in this article. For this purpose, KPMG interviewed CEOs of various renowned companies in the USA. According to the respondents, the most critical trust factors are algorithm integrity, explainability, fairness in terms of ethics and accountability, and resilience.