India leads in AI talent, lags in GenAI adoption

India is ahead in terms of the artificial intelligence (AI) talent base but the country lags when it comes to the adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) among enterprises, Arundhati Bhattacharya, chief executive officer (CEO) and chairperson, Salesforce India said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the company’s World Tour Essentials event in Mumbai, she said technology alone was capable of enhancing the standard of living of Indians and improving the level of services at a time when the country catches up with AI technology.

“India needs to do a lot of catching up (on GenAI). We definitely are a country that is maturing much faster than the rest of the world, maybe because we are slightly behind the curve. It’s the industry adoption, where we are slightly behind the curve,” Bhattacharya said.
“For a country as big as ours, the only way we are going to increase the level of our services, and the standard of living of our people is by using technology. There is no brick-and-mortar way of getting this done,” she said.

It is the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) that has made people feel that they need to leapfrog very quickly because the capabilities that are being seen by digitising business and by using AI are something that was not seen, she said.

Bhattacharya said people were beginning to understand GenAI’s power after they had experienced it in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) company announced the launch of a public sector division, and a tool handling digital lending for loan origination.

“Whether it is the central or the state government, or the quasi-government agencies, they all have different requirements. But they’re a very large segment. And therefore, it was important for us at some point in time, to make a concerted effort to see what are the specific requirements of the segment and how do we start addressing them,” Bhattacharya said.

As a larger view, the use cases involving the public sector division at the firm will look at unifying the data across different silos spanning various governmental departments, and responsiveness to citizens.

“If we were to think about use cases, probably two big ones include how we unify data across different silos of departments. Second is on how we can be more responsive to citizens using call centres, automation chatbots, among others,” said Arun Kumar Parameswaran, SVP and Managing Director, Sales & Distribution, Salesforce India.

When it comes to the recently launched public sector division, the company said it would follow the due processes of a request of proposal with the government. The digital lending solution for loan origination would include solutions for personal loans, auto loans, and home loans.

“The lending solution takes into account the Indian requirements such as the new ones integrating into the Indian stack. These requirements are for products which are specifically Indian,” Bhattacharya added.

The company, along with its ecosystem of customers and partners, is expecting to create 1.8 million new jobs by 2028, according to an IDC study. Salesforce has been trying to expand its footprint in India since Bhattacharya took over the mandate. Its India headcount is over 11,000 and counts corporates like Pidilite, Air India, Bajaj Finance Limited Auto Finance, Hero Fincorp and several others as its customers. Business Standard