Envisioning an AatmaNirbhar Bharat by adopting emerging technologies in India

According to a Gartner forecast, IT spending in India is predicted to reach a total of $101.8 billion in 2022, an increase of 7% from 2021. The digital transformation trajectory that the pandemic created is here to stay and has helped shape the always-on right-now economy that we live in. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic and impacts of the Omicron variant, the Indian economy is recovering with higher margins and will continue to boost technology investments.

Data-driven technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), along with machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G connectivity have a critical role to play in addressing the challenges of economic growth and sustainable inclusive development in the country. Indian CIOs are massively increasing their spending to drive innovation, modernize legacy systems, and strengthen the “Make in India” initiative. Hiring a skilled workforce is also a key priority to deliver a sheer volume of ideas and innovation in the technology landscape.

AI is a promising area for India’s future. The Government of India has always been at the forefront to encourage and support India’s IT industry to build applications for healthcare, education, telecom, and banking sectors for the benefit of India’s digital growth. The government is also constantly putting efforts to upskill and train the youth in niche skillsets and be the innovators of the technology ecosystem. The pace of growth that we are witnessing in our country today, is nurturing bright ideas and enabling the idea’s journey towards creating a meaningful impact in society.

The potential these technologies have for future growth in India is endless. Here are a few ways we will start to see them innovate different sectors over the next few years.

Real-time data platform to power telecom sector

India is the world’s second-largest telecommunications market with a subscriber base of about 1.16 billion. The initiatives taken by the government to transform the nation into a digital economy are further boosting the telecom sector across the country. Moreover, the ongoing pandemic has also created a surge in demand for the latest technology in telecommunications. The growing penetration of mobile phones and a strong digital ecosystem is proof that it is time for many more innovations to happen in India and to resolve key challenges faced by the nation.

There is a massive amount of streaming data coming in from mobile, 5G, and IoT sensor applications. The challenge is to manage, leverage, and analyze this data across silos, optimize new investments in modern infrastructure and applications, and provide the best customer experience – all at real-time speeds. With modern ad advanced data infrastructure, telcos will be able to –

* Reduce data-centric hardware costs

* Reduce millisecond latency and improve responsiveness and performance

* Better experience of uptime for business applications

* Rapid scaling to 10’s to 100’s of millions of subscribers per application

* Better management of application traffic growth with ease

* Reduction in customer churn through real-time usage analysis

* Increased cross-sell and up-sell through real-time personalization.

Enterprises are bringing solutions to prevent fraud by streaming transactional data and combining it with historical data in real-time with AI/ML models to prevent breaches or fraud in the network, payment systems, and customer accounts. These solutions enable the prevention of unauthorized account access for TV, Internet, and mobile usage and services, cloning of TV and networking devices or payments.

To digitally transform, charging and policy management systems need to access subscriber information in real-time. Such systems need to aggregate data from operational support systems and user portals to make any number of decisions on services. To have a responsive, flexible system, you will need a real-time, reliable data platform. By embedding the real-time data management technologies with some of the leading telco solution providers, personalized customer experience for rating, discounting, promotions, and settlements across networks can be delivered.

Telcos are rapidly shifting from 4G to 5G and are developing horizontal cloud for their IT needs and enterprise businesses. Furthermore, the adoption of 5G in India may seek to provide enhanced broadband, Internet over things (IoT), industrial automation, smart cities, smart agriculture, telehealth remote patient monitoring, and so on. This multi-dimensional shift in the direction of a digital economy intends to unleash new potential for India to embrace the 5G technology by focusing on automation, high reliability and security, mobile edge computing and artificial intelligence, and real-time data management.

Over the years, the telecom sector in India has transformed the communication landscape and continues to play a crucial role in building the infrastructure for Digital India as envisioned by the Indian government. For the world’s second-largest telecommunications market, the Union Budget 2022-23 has also provided the perfect booster shot which not only aims at stimulating IT infrastructure investment but also accelerating the pace of shift in focus from coverage and voice to applications that impact a billion-plus Indians. The intent is to position the sector from being a service provider to a world-class service enabler.

The government has also promised to roll out 5G to enhance broadband services in rural areas and boost local manufacturing under the productivity-linked incentive scheme. The IT industry looks forward to a continued and constructive engagement with the government for strengthening the ‘Make in India’ and ‘AatmaNirbhar Bharat’ initiatives and making the sector globally competitive.

Banking on AI

The global economy is recovering faster than expected along with the markets soaring. With the onset of the pandemic, we have seen a major shift in the adoption of digital technology with multi-faceted opportunities in the financial sector, however posing certain challenges of tackling cybersecurity concerns, among others. In 2022, financial institutions will embrace a future-fit technology strategy and accelerate their end-to-end digital transformation to compete and survive in an increasingly unpredictable, post-pandemic world.

Over the last decade, large domestic banks have increasingly invested in technological and operational capabilities to survive in the digital marketplace and are providing seamless, innovative, and more delightful customer experiences. Unlike the traditional banking structure which engaged a lot of paperwork, the use of AI has made it a contactless, paperless system that can draw insights on a real-time basis. According to an IDC report, Indian banks are projected to spend over US$1 billion by 2025 on public cloud initiatives, indicating the prominence of the cloud is driving the technology transformation.

AI offers a holistic transformation of the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) enterprise through its sheer use of cloud computing and digitization ensuring an enhanced customer experience combined with optimization of cost and time. AI has also played a key role in allowing the banking industry to understand its customers’ needs and preferences by providing personalized services.

In combination with the cloud, AI offers unparalleled speed, agility, and flexibility helping to analyze present data and unlock valuable insights to improve predictive abilities and data-driven business outcomes. Big data analytics is also redefining banking in India by drastically reducing cyber risks and enabling increased customer retention. However, a lack of understanding of the application, sustainability, and feasibility of the technology is still a major challenge faced by the sector while we are rapidly moving to AI.

The BFSI sector which was once “change-resistant” is now seeing high rates of tech adoption in the past two decades with AI being a huge changemaker. In a recent study by Allied Market Research, it was stated that the global market for AI in the BFSI sector was valued at USD 17.8 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach USD 247 billion by 2026. The government has been mobilizing the adoption of FinTech with initiatives like Jan Dhan Yojana, UPI, BharatNet mission which is accelerating the internet adoption rate across India. As the digital surge in finance accelerates, deployment of AL in BFSI will amplify the much-needed ability to analyze data at a real-time scale, derive contextual conclusions, and tackle banking frauds with much more precision.

Road ahead

The future lies in AI, ML, and real-time data solutions, and we are on the cusp of a major data-driven revolution, and that could be a game-changer for a data-rich country like India. Demand for intelligent banking, customer experience, and AI/ML technologies are now more essential to bridge the digital divide and promote a tech-led digital economy with immense opportunities to grow.

With an emphasis on providing further impetus to the Digital India initiative, it is now more than ever crucial for the industry, government, and academia to work together to support technology development in India. This requires a focus on identifying areas and sectors that could benefit from these emerging, new technologies and making the necessary investments to deploy them successfully.

-- Aveekshith Bushan, Regional Director & General Manager for the Asia Pacific at Aerospike.