In a recent event arranged by Nasscom, Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani has stated that India is on the cusp of major artificial intelligence innovations. He is confident that both the business side and the government side are well placed to apply AI uniquely. To further understand the statement, one must take a look at the latest AI-based innovative operations taking place in the education, economy, and health sector of India. With the emergence of the'Made in India' drive, 1 billion dollars of funding has been allocated to semiconductor companies using AI. The scheme is also encouraging the local chip makers of India with the assurance that the government will buy their locally made chips.

India will see the breakthrough application of artificial intelligence (AI) in various areas including the National Language Translation Mission, said Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani. Nilekani said this during a fireside chat with Ajay Sawhney, secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and Debjani Ghosh, president of IT industry body Nasscom. The interaction was organized by INDIAai, a national AI portal set up by MeitY, National E-Governance Division, and Nasscom. "The work that MeitY is doing on the national language translation mission is a disruptive opportunity," Nilekani said. "India is unique in the fact that it has such a large number of languages, all co-mingling, and most Indians speak two to three languages and so on. Creating the world's best language capability, whether its speech, text to speech, whether its language to language, I think India is well placed to show the world how to do it," he added.

When Vishal Sikka, the then CEO of Infosys and the now the vice-chairman, arrived in a driverless golf cart at the firm's Bengaluru Campus recently, it showed the world how artificial intelligence or AI may become the new world order in the years to come. The software, 'driving' the cart, had been developed by Infosys together with IIT-Delhi. The vehicle can be used on a pre-determined route. "This is an example of the kind of things we are using to teach our employees," said Mr. Sikka. "We built the autonomous systems in the cart to teach our employees to build autonomous driving technology."

Data is the new natural resource that can empower every citizen in a country like India, Microsoft's India-born CEO Satya Nadella said on Monday during a discussion on the digital world, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. There is need for "recognising that data is the new natural resource instead of looking at it as being unevenly spread" for empowering every citizen of India, Nadella said in a dialogue with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani. In India, several state governments are using data resources and computing power for governance, Nadella said. The government of Andhra Pradesh is using cloud services to track high school dropouts in order to build interventions while ICRISAT is using machine learning to improve the yield of farmers, he said. "I was looking at the big consumers of the public cloud (computing) and one thing that came up was the Election Commission in Tamil Nadu,'' Nadella said with reference to the usage of CCTV cameras in Tamil Nadu at election booths in 2016. Nadella said that the broad technology areas that he is currently excited about is cloud computing, artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Much of the entrepreneurial energy in India is around cloud computing, he said. What has been seen so far in terms of artificial intelligence is statistical machine learning by using the power of data and real AI is still in the future, Nadella said. "In Punjab, I believe we took all the call centre data … We analysed the speech so that the government can get a better handle on what are the issues that can be automated and what needs human services.

The Microsoft chief's comments come in the wake of Bill Gates' call for levying taxes on robots that take away jobs from people, reports Ayan Pramanik Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that embracing Artificial Intelligence without reskilling people will have an impact on jobs, even as it has displayed efficiency in delivery of government services. "I think it is an exciting future, but at the same time, you have to be very mindful of the impact of AI on jobs. That's why I want to make sure some of the skilling work we are doing in India is going to help people," said Nadella at an interaction with the architect of Aadhaar, Nandan Nilekani. Nadella's comments come in the wake of Microsoft founder Bill Gates' call for levying taxes on robots that take away jobs from people. Nadella pointed out that Microsoft had been able to use AI to improve efficiency in government services in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."

When Binny Bansal, co-founder of India's largest retailer Flipkart was studying at IIT-Delhi, nobody at his institute was interested in the subject of artificial intelligence. "Because nothing was happening in India," Mr. Bansal told his co-panelists Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani during a fireside chat at an event in Bengaluru. That was 15 years ago and a lot has changed since. On Monday, Mr. Nadella, who leads the world's largest software maker, announced a strategic partnership with Flipkart, where the e-commerce company would adopt the company's cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure. Flipkart said that it planned to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics capabilities in Azure to optimise its data for innovative merchandising, advertising, marketing and customer service.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. SEE ALSO: Here's why those tech billionaires are throwing millions at ethical AI "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."

Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be harnessed strategically in national building to provide equal access to opportunities to all, Nadan Nilekani, the former chairman of India's Unique ID Authority, said during a conference in Bengaluru on Monday. Failure to do so will invite a backlash, Nilekani warned, as large numbers of people see themselves being left out with the fruits of technological advancement benefiting only a few. "How do we use all this stuff that you guys have built and flip it around to benefit large numbers of people, and I think that is very important," Nilekani said in a discussion with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp, at a conference on Artificial Intelligence organised by the company. "If we don't do that, I think the backlash, as we've seen in the US, is going to be quite a lot." Nilekani wasn't available for a follow-on discussion, but he was probably referring to many more Americans voting for Donald Trump -- helping Trump become their president -- than any pundits had anticipated, as they feared that his opponent Hillary Clinton represented the elite.