AI: Making India an AI-first nation – from classrooms to boardrooms

With one of the youngest populations in the world and a focus on technology, India has a unique human capital advantage to leverage AI for significant economic and social benefits. Empowering people with AI skills will be a fundamental step towards India becoming an AI-first nation.Demand for AI skills far outstrips supply of talent, putting India in a unique position to leverage its demographic advantage. AI skills have become a key consideration for job selection across the globe as organizations seek to scale their businesses with AI.

Given the universal applicability of AI, organizations across industries will need to build a robust and inclusive talent base with future-proof skills to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation to remain competitive.

Earlier this year, the world population crossed the eight billion mark. Today, one in six people on Earth lives in India. AI is key to India’s Digital Infrastructure (DPI), and every day the question arises: How and what needs to be done to get AI into the hands of everyone?

As technology changes, work on responsible AI governance must keep pace. As outlined in the India AI Mission and Viksit Bharat 2047, the public and private sectors will need to come together to democratize access to AI skills. We need to adopt a skills-first approach to AI to ensure that our citizens can participate and thrive in the AI ​​economy.

This requires a three-pronged approach to building skills from classrooms to boardrooms: 1) Building AI skills at the grassroots; 2) Increasing AI fluency in government; and 3) Empowering organizations with a future-ready workforce. AI skills can help transform India’s global competitiveness and accelerate our growth and development.

Liquidity at the core

Empowering grassroots communities with AI literacy can spark innovation at scale, empowering people to benefit from AI advances. Nonprofits, in partnership with industry and government stakeholders, can play an important role in driving grassroots AI literacy. They can provide AI literacy resources and technologies, financial support, and technical assistance to build and scale programs that have social impact.

The nonprofit SEEDS is using AI gene to help vulnerable people in slums understand the dangers of heatwaves and protect themselves. Sunny Lives, an AI model that helped generate heatwave risk information for about 125,000 people, has enabled many at-risk people to develop innovative home solutions to reduce the impact of heatwaves, confirming how AI skills can help unlock human ingenuity and improve quality of life.

Agriculture is another important case. Farmers face challenges such as unpredictable weather conditions, uncontrolled pests and diseases, crop loss, soil degradation, and limited connectivity to buyers/sellers. We need solutions that facilitate data collection from satellites, weather providers, and sensors. For example, Farmvibes.AI uses AI to provide farmers with valuable information on soil moisture, temperature, humidity, pH, and other parameters. In addition, Agripilot.ai provides farmers with actionable insights on how to grow food more sustainably. These innovations provide farmers with data-driven tools to increase productivity and sustainability in agriculture.

Organizations and industry can play a supporting role in seeding the next generation of AI innovators by partnering with educational institutions to train students in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. By imparting skills that increase female representation in AI, cloud, and cybersecurity, industry can play a supporting role in building a diverse and inclusive talent pool.

From developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to overcome barriers to multilingual communication to increasing agricultural productivity through data analytics, strategic investments in human capital can yield significant development benefits.

The author is President, Microsoft India and South Asia. All views expressed are personal.