Q&A with Anil Bhasker, Cloud & Data platform Sales Leader, IBM Technology Sales
June 01, 2021
Covid-19 has greatly accelerated the adoption of artificial intelligence in industries
The pandemic has accelerated the rollout of AI in enterprises across industry verticals. In a conversation with BusinessLine, Anil Bhasker, Cloud & Data platform Sales Leader, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India/South Asia said, India is uniquely positioned to succeed in the AI economy.
How has the pandemic impacted the adoption of AI in Indian enterprises?
IBM’s Global AI Adoption Index 2021 found that while AI adoption was flat last year, we are poised for a major uptick in AI investments as companies continue to find ways to emerge from the pandemic. Many organizations in India lean on NLP (natural language processing) technologies and AI automation to help lower costs and get trusted information into the hands of their customers, partners and employees as they look for new ways to engage with them across a distributed work environment. We are witnessing clients moving to deploy AI at scale. As per the IBM CEO Study, in India, 45 per cent of CEOs expect AI machine learning to deliver results in 2-3 years. While the pandemic has accelerated the AI agenda more horizontally within many organizations, we have been witnessing many interesting use cases. For eg: Emerald Jewellery, one of India's largest jewellery manufacturers, with their "Tej" mobile app, a first-of-its-kind AI enabled mobile application has been able to showcase their latest collection to over 200 dealers, enabling them to search through a growing catalogue of over 5 lakh jewellery designs quickly and navigate the complex ordering process easily. The Tej app played a key role in staying connected with their dealers last year seamlessly even during the peak lockdown.