Hyderabad: Poised to be a leader in AI

As the world eagerly delves into the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), learning more while it harnesses AI’s potential, the Telangana Global AI Summit 2024 at Hyderabad is poised to spotlight the latest trends in AI technology, advance our understanding, and explore the profound impact of AI-based innovation in sectors like Healthcare, Life Sciences, Education, Agriculture, Law, Judiciary, Manufacturing and Citizen Services.

From reducing traffic jams to helping farmers get better yields, these technologies are transforming how governments serve their citizens. Hyderabad is quickly establishing itself as a global technology hub, perfectly positioned to harness the potential of an AI-driven future.

Adopting AI technologies across industries has today turned into a reality from being a vision of the future. Governments and public institutions have begun to integrate AI-driven solutions to optimize their services and enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and elevate citizen engagement and experience. These technologies are making a difference, not in abstract terms, but in ways that touch people's lives every day.

In Telangana, AI is being used to overcome traditional agricultural challenges - by analysing crop data and soil conditions, AI provides personalized guidance to farmers, to maximize yield and get the best possible harvest. Farmers who have used these AI tools have reported a 21% increase in yield per acre, 9% reduction in pesticide usage, 5% decrease in fertilizer usage, and 8% increase in sales prices.

AI plays a critical role in healthcare by predicting disease outbreaks and helping allocate resources where they’re needed the most. Predictive analytics was leveraged during the pandemic to identify vulnerable populations. Today, AI-driven healthcare initiatives are making medical advice easily accessible to people in remote villages enabling timely interventions while minimizing the need to travel. This is especially important in a country like ours, where access to healthcare can be unevenly distributed. Further, AI-driven diagnostic tools can help early detection and treatment of diseases, and automation of administrative functions that involve patient records will remove bottlenecks and increase patient satisfaction. Doctors are trying to be more efficient and accurate in their diagnosis effort thru leveraging GenAI powered summarization and insights from various test reports.

AI-driven tools are enabling governments to enhance transparency and accountability. For example, AI can track high-volume data to flag any anomalies in public spending, assuring prudent use of resources. Additionally, AI-enabled chatbots and virtual assistants empower citizen interactions by automating the information sharing process, enabling timely responses to inquiries.

AI is being adapted to personalize learning experiences for students. AI-driven platforms can assess an individual's learning style and change content to fit this, enabling personalized education for every student. AI also automates different kinds of administrative work that can allow teachers to make teaching the main business of their day.

AI and Machine Learning (ML) play an important role in public safety too. The predictive policing feature, using ML algorithms, allows the Police to anticipate and prevent criminal activities. The AI-driven surveillance system helps increase situational awareness and reduces response times for a safer community.

Across the industry sectors, AI has been enabling organizations to get the most value from their unique data, reimagine entire value chains, experience pervasive performance improvements, create new ways of working, and foster innovation.

In Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, AI can help with forward-looking insights bynmining complex sets of data. This provides increased forecasting ability, enhanced and real-time fraud detection and mitigation, advanced governance and risk management. AI can enable frictionless claim experiences by extracting information from images leveraging AI-powered bots.

Reimagining the entire Manufacturing value chain with AI can enable faster time-to-market with accelerated product design and development, enhanced supply chain resilience with dynamic warehousing and logistics management, improved equipment effectiveness and reduced cost of quality with predictive maintenance, improved aftersales service and lowering of warranty costs by reducing the mean time to respond to customer issues.

AI can have a significant impact on the Retail industry too. It can increase customer satisfaction and employee productivity with AI-assisted conversational solutions for stores, enrich customer product discovery experience and increase online conversion rates with AI-driven intelligent omni-channel retail solutions, improve product design and launch timelines with AI-powered product ideation, product content, and image generation solutions for retail merchandizers. It can optimize retail supply chain and increase workforce productivity with AI-driven operations.

While AI has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our lives, there are several keyissues that need to be addressed as the adoption of AI steadily increases. These issues are related to privacy, transparency, explainability, fairness, accountability, compliance, security, and safety.

There is a pressing need to identify all risks and issues that may arise and address these in a timely manner. The data collected for AI systems can lead to privacy breaches, with misuse of personal information Findings from the TCS AI for Business study, as well as our own experience, show that most organizations are looking at how to balance risk with opportunity as they move forward with their AI strategy. Many organizations have started to operationalize responsible AI measures.

Hyderabad, rightly called the Cyber City in India, is uniquely poised to ride the AI revolution. Growing and influential, the technological ecosystem in the city offers an ideal breeding ground for innovation, paired with strong government backup.

• Education Powerhouse: Hyderabad houses a majority of the 150 Engineering colleges in the state that produce around 90,000 Engineers every year. This steady stream of talent is crucial for driving AI innovation, not just in the city, but across the country.

• AI Jobs on the Rise: By 2025, AI is expected to create 12 million more jobs than it displaces. In India around 400,000 new jobs are expected over the next few years. In Hyderabad alone, thousands of professionals are being trained in AI and related technologies, through initiatives like the Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK), Telangana State Innovation Cell (TSIC) and the upcoming Telangana Skills University. These programs ensure that the workforce is ready to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving job market. TCS centre in Hyderabad itself trained more than 67000 associates in AI related technologies.

• Startups and Innovation Ecosystem The city is home to majority of the 6000+ startups, many of which are at the forefront of AI and ML innovation. A Hyderabad-based startup is building affordable space launch vehicles. Another startup is developing AI- powered robots for security and surveillance, a technology that could soon be part of every smart city in India. Hyderabad is seeing significant investments in AI. Startups in Hyderabad have raised a funding of USD 0.54 Billion in a year.

• Continuously Improving Infrastructure: Hyderabad boasts some of the finest infrastructure that fuels the growth of AI and other advanced technologies. Access to excellent academic institutions, research centers, and technology parks, all create an innovation-driven, collaborative culture.

• Collaborative Business Ecosystem: A vibrant ecosystem between industry, academia, and active cooperation with the government, promotes innovation and rapidly develops solutions based on artificial intelligence. The government’s proactive approach, through various initiatives like Telangana AI Mission (T-AIM), Research and Innovation Circle of Hyderabad (RICH), Emerging Technologies (ET) wing of the IT Electronics & Communication Department, Proposal to build an AI city further accelerates this growth.

• Presence of Global Majors: Partnerships with large tech companies(large and growing presence of IT majors, Semiconductor companies, Hyper Scalers, MNCs in various sectors) around the world have placed Hyderabad at the center of a government-led transformation involving AI.

The confluence of all the required elements makes Hyderabad the right place to begin shaping an AI-driven future and make AI work safely for everyone. The Telangana Global AI Summit 2024 provides a glimpse into this future and establishes the right context, content and connect for everyone to be part of this exciting journey.

The established forms of AI such as predictive analytics, machine learning, and automation, combined with the emergence of Generative AI, are leading a new industrial revolution.