On our 23rd Anniversary of the Digit Magazine, we invited stalwarts and leaders from the tech industry to give their perspectives on the role of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in India.
Mr. Raju Pullan, Senior Vice President, MX Business, Samsung India, shares his insights on the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India, where a large youth population is driving fast-paced adoption and Samsung’s ‘AI for All’ vision is making AI accessible to all, empowering the country and transforming the future. Here’s the full article below, the article was originally published in the June 2024 AI Special Anniversary issue of Digit magazine.
The role of AI in India’s future by Mr Raju Pullan, Senior Vice President, MX Business, Samsung India.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most important technological breakthrough we have witnessed in over a decade. Understandably, it has become a topic of everyday conversation. There are two reasons behind the massive interest in AI.
Firstly, the advancement in Generative AI, which promises to boost everyday productivity. This has garnered interest of people from all walks of life. Second is the integration of AI into smartphones, making mobile devices the primary access point for AI. This means, millions of consumers can now experience the transformative power of AI. India as a nation, too, is witnessing fast-paced adoption of Artificial Intelligence, owing to a large population of young, tech-savvy consumers.
At Samsung, we are happy to be at the centre of the AI revolution. Earlier this year, we unveiled our ‘AI for All’ vision, showcasing how AI will enable people to experience their devices more intuitively and conveniently than ever before. We believe AI will enable connected technologies to improve people’s daily lives while always remaining non-intrusive and in the background. With our model of open collaboration, we want to bring AI and hyper-connectivity to all our consumers.
We see AI as a transformational force – one that helps people break the barriers of communication, simplifying their lives. Technology thus becomes an enabler. For Samsung, India is one of the biggest playgrounds for AI. Earlier this year, we launched our first AI-powered smartphone – the Galaxy S24 – with the desire to unleash our consumers’ creativity, enhance their productivity and unlock a new world of possibilities. The huge success of the S24 in India showcases the fact that Indian consumers are among the best adopters of technology.
To democratize AI, we have taken another huge step by bringing AI features to many other Galaxy smartphones so that consumers can harness the unlimited possibilities of mobile AI. Our endeavour is to make mobile AI easy to access and ignite new possibilities for all.
As we pioneer ground-breaking experiences in mobile AI, we’ve thought a lot about how this new and exciting technology can enhance our lives and inspire society’s next steps. Applied with care and consideration, AI helps people communicate freely despite the myriad languages in our country, complete everyday tasks easily and so much more. Moreover, we are already planning the next steps for AI beyond smartphones — optimizing it for various categories of devices across various services. In the near future, select wearables will use AI to enhance digital health and unlock a whole new era of expanded intelligent health experiences.
We will keep enriching and expanding AI experiences across categories through collaborations with more industry-leading AI partners. It’s also important to raise the standards of security and privacy in this new era of data-intensive mobile experiences. That is one of the reasons we’ve taken a hybrid approach that combines on-device and cloud-based AI. Besides ensuring seamless usability, this lets users limit some features to function entirely on-device, giving them greater control over what they do with their data.
AI will empower people, transform India
Over the last few years, India has rapidly risen to become the world’s fifth-largest economy. It is being praised for creating a world-class digital public infrastructure that is underpinning the country’s growth story.
AI is poised to fire up economic development in the country, and foster innovation at scale, create unprecedented employment opportunities, and contribute to sustainable growth.
There is a growing nationwide realization, especially by businesses, on the need to embrace AI as a core component of their future strategy. The top priority for India, therefore, would be to cultivate a robust workforce capable of not just exploring and learning about AI’s potential but also applying their knowledge at scale and touching the grassroots.
Inverting the pyramid
Technology deployment has always been top-down. From tech pioneers and R&D centres to businesses and finally trickling down to communities, through real use cases, the percolation of technology has typically followed a slower pace.
Though India is at the forefront of innovating and embracing digital technologies, just as the mass-scale adoption of computers took decades to materialise, we must not wait for AI to become a distant reality for the masses.
That would require an ‘invert the pyramid’ mindset, where we do not wait for the next leap in technology to trickle down from the ‘top’, but encourage a culture of AI innovation and entrepreneurship at the grassroots level so that the next era of AI is not dictated down to the spiral but scaled up and amplified from the bottom-up. Many may see it as wishful thinking, but the fact is India, with its enormous pool of digital-savvy youth, has the capability to drive an AI revolution from its smallest towns.
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