Efficiency Vs Mass employment
The Survey points to the rising uncertainty caused by AI and the disrupting effect that it can have across various sectors. At one end of the spectrum, it poses capabilities that would augment businesses by increasing their efficiency. At the same time, it is to be approached with caution as large scale employment may be drastically affected. The Survey points that India’s young, talented and burgeoning workforce drive the country’s growth and a hit to this wide base will create a shaky ground. It sure seems like a delicate line to thread upon.
Race to crack the AI code
World over, countries and large corporations cry out loud on the need to draft regulations around ethical AI use, but at the same time are rushing to ensure that they enjoy the first entry benefit before such policies are formed. The three tech tycoons, Google, Meta and Microsoft spent cumulatively more than USD 32 billion in Q1 FY25. Goldman Sachs projects that big tech companies will collectively spend over USD 1 trillion on AI over the next five years. While investors are wary of the huge costs and associated potential returns, the CEOs of Google and Meta stressed that the risk of not heavily investing now clearly outweighed the risk of investing too less and being left behind in the race.
All these capital go towards data centres and other technologies required for AI development. NVIDIA has seen the most benefit from this surge as their Graphic Processing Units (GPU) form the basis of the powerful AI computation models. Unlike the present Central Processing Units (CPU) in our computers, GPUs are specialised and superfast processors that make parallel processing very fast and powerful. The company is now valued at about USD 3 trillion and more than 40 per cent of its revenue comes from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle.
Venturing into the hardware and software aspects
India too is well aware of the need to be on top of this. The present Indian market is nascent but it is expected to be worth USD 17 billion by 2027. Yet it will be a tiny portion of the global market size that would touch USD 297 billion in the same year. Successful AI implementation involves both software and hardware. To facilitate the ecosystem, in March 2024, the government announced an AI mission with an investment of USD 1.25 billion. It will be a public-private partnership model with focus on developing GPUs as a digital public infrastructure that can offer AI-as-a-service, provide access to targeted funding for AI startups and for the development of large language models. Development of technology itself requires lot of IT prowess and Indian software industry is well-renowned for its services. They have started to pitch in strong use cases and outcomes have become visible from their recent revenue reports. Accenture announced USD 2 billion in Gen AI revenue booked during H12024 while TCS reported USD 900 million during this period, with 10 per cent in production to be billed within FY 2025.
Apart from the core technology sector, as mentioned in the Survey, AI’s impact cuts across all horizontals. Like the desktop and software revolutions, it is definitely expected to leave a mark on humanity, but whose imprint will be stronger is the question that lingers.
