A PwC-ASSOCHAM joint report suggests India should pursue cross-border collaboration with AI leaders including the UK, Japan, and Germany.
The study believes government departments including the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) should take responsibility for building these relationships.
“Exchanging best practices and learnings from prior initiatives is one way of strengthening cooperation,” noted the study.
Collaboration between the countries is expected to help formulate strategies which tackle social and economic challenges by adopting technologies such as AI, machine learning, and other advancements such as the IoT.
The researchers wrote in the ‘Advance artificial intelligence for growth: Leveraging AI & robotics for India’s economic transformation’ report:
“While academia and the private sector focus their research activities on finding applications with diverse usage, the public sector, with its various schemes (Digital India, Make in India, Skill India, etc.), could identify areas where specific applications of AI and robotics can be utilised to increase reach, effectiveness and efficiency, thus giving direction to existing innovation across different fields.”
Some of the other measures which could drive AI growth is the creation of data banks and exchanges which allow the streaming of information from various industries. This data can then be used for training new machine learning models.
The report also notes an overhaul of the education system – in particular, secondary school and university curricula – will help to foster AI interest and prepare the next generation workforce.
Both of these suggestions feed into the researchers’ final idea, and that’s to set up centres of excellence. At these centres, inter-disciplinary research can be conducted across fields such as law, medicine, engineering, management, and social sciences.
“Government could act as a catalyst in furthering growth by opening training centres focused on equipping young individuals with high-end skills in the field of analytics and ML, which, in turn, could be tied in with inviting data-driven global enterprises to set up their centres of excellence in India,” the researchers say.
The full report can be downloaded here (PDF)
What are your thoughts on the researchers’ suggestions?
