For the past year, 36-year-old Fazil Mohamed has spent an entire night on caffeine making sense of neural networks. In April, Mr. Mohammed finally obtained his postgraduate certification in AI/ML from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. He is now using his credentials to take on a new role at Data Poem, a deep learning optimization company located on the other side of Bangalore. city.
Mohammed is one of many workers in India scrambling to cope with the rapid rise of generative AI that threatens to completely change the tech landscape, not to mention the job market. is. “Learning about AI is paramount,” says Mohammed.
The Indian government has also agreed. Electronics and Information Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar declared on the WION news channel in March that “there is absolutely no doubt that India will become an important pole in the world of AI in the coming years.” Chandrasekhar went on to praise the benefits already being felt from the growing use of AI and India’s ambition to help shape international guardrails for development in the field. “We will have a leading agreement in shaping the future of AI,” he said.
Private investment in AI in both countries amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year, and India has a long way to go to catch up with the US and China in this regard. Then, of course, there is the question of how generative AI will affect India’s vast IT services industry. This industry is a sector that has helped solidify the country’s reputation as the world’s favorite back office. Ultimately, the core premise behind many new LLM derivatives is the ability to automate a necessary but time-consuming process that the Indian IT services sector is happy to undertake. JP Morgan warned in February that generative AI models like ChatGPT would actually slow market share gains and drive prices down for the industry. This is a truly alarming prospect for a country that exported $106 billion in IT services alone between 2021 and 2022.
Generative AI could threaten India’s outsourcing market
India’s IT services industry has been supported by global conglomerates for many years. Airlines such as Swissair and British Airways were among the first to outsource back-office operations to India in the 1990s, seeking to take advantage of India’s low wages, favorable labor laws and surplus engineering and science graduates. was one. IT companies soon followed suit. What started as a form of cost arbitrage dating back to the present day is now an important source of quality talent and innovation for leading companies in Europe and North America.
Will tools like ChatGPT change the equation? Saurab Gupta thinks otherwise. “In fact, it could be a big boon,” says the president of HFS Research. “But that would eliminate mediocre services.” Gupta hopes generative AI will expand the range of jobs his IT workers in India can do, making their jobs more enjoyable. doing. While many back-office jobs in India were generally “boring, mundane, and paperwork,” tools like ChatGPT open the door to more creative and judgmental roles. Gupta thinks it could be possible. Not to mention the high salaries.
India’s AI ambitions aren’t just limited to maintaining its vaunted IT services sector. The country also pursues homegrown innovation. The company already has a strong workforce. According to Stanford University’s annual AI index, Indian AI startups ranked him fifth in terms of investment in 2022. In the same year, approximately 24.2% of GitHub AI projects were contributed by Indian software developers.
So does India have any hope of challenging US dominance in AI? Given the maturity of the education and investment framework to support the likes of OpenAI and Google to build massive new foundational models, it seems unlikely in the short to medium term. Still, the Indian government “doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel” to catch up with international AI rivals, explains Jib Elias. IndiaAI’s head of research and governance predicts that India’s most promising innovations will build on existing models and involve fine-tuning models to maximize efficiency and economic value. “We Indians have a habit of surprising everyone,” he says.
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Gupta agrees. He said India’s IT services industry could have the greatest impact by contextualizing large-scale models built abroad to produce fine-tuned tools tailored for everything from payroll administration to mortgage issuance. claim to be able to give “The US and China will focus on B2C, [business-to-consumer] Use case, I think India can make a name for itself in B2B [business-to-business] industry,” Gupta says.
Indian workers are ‘up-skilled’
There is only one problem with this plan. A national brain drain is driving India’s brightest tech talent to Silicon Valley in search of sunny highlands and higher salaries. “I see Arvind Krishna, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai,” says Elias. “All these amazing people are from India. That is the big problem we have now with generative AI.”
India’s technology industry body NASSCOM estimates that there are currently around 416,000 engineers working in the AI field in India, with an additional 213,000 engineers in demand. Facing a clear talent shortage, Indian companies are offering high salaries to attract and retain talent.
This sparked a wave of “skilling up”. EdTech is booming in India as graduates like Fazil Mohammed look to secure their future amid the rapid rise of AI. A recent survey found that 83% of his workers in India intend to ‘upskill’ this year, compared to the global average of 74%.
Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder of Bangalore-based e-learning startup Scaler, said he has also noticed the recent boom in upskilling, especially in the AI/ML space. “Savvy professionals know they need to stay up-to-date to stay relevant to the industry,” he says. “Generative AI won’t directly replace jobs, but people who can use these new-age tools and bring higher value to companies will be much more in demand than those with outdated skills. “
Gupta is more cautious. While there has been a brief boom in courses promising to teach the art of using and creating AI, Gupta believes these new technologies will ultimately prove necessary for India’s future workforce to succeed. We believe in changing skills and training types. He argues that as tools like ChatGPT get better programmed, basic coding is no longer enough. “I think we need to understand more about the business context,” said Gupta, predicting that so-called “soft skills” such as communication and leadership will also become more important to the Indian economy. Creativity will be required. ”
While the U.S. may lead the field in developing huge LLMs, both Gupta and Elias said India would like to help companies fine-tune their LLMs to effectively solve their problems. , believes it will spark India’s own generative AI boom. Mohammed is similarly optimistic, especially about India’s potential to use AI to solve its deep-seated social challenges. “AI offers endless possibilities for solving complex problems that were previously thought to be insurmountable,” he says.
