Infosys co-founder says AI app in THESE 3 areas can impact India massively, they are…

Infosys co-founder says AI app in THESE 3 areas can impact India massively, they are…

Infosys co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani held a long talk on Artificial Intelligence (AI) use cases, its impact and what India needs in the context of AI.  

Taking the example of Chinese AI startup Deepseek, rival to OpenAI’s GPT, he stated that it shows that we don’t need to invest billions of dollars for developing good large language models (LLMs), which is a big breakthrough.  

He continued to make the point that these developments suggest barriers to create new AI models are lowering and with the Indian government pushing for AI innovations, India may see some very significant models in the next one year.  

Developing AI models are expensive 

The Infosys Chairman was discussing about AI in a talk with Moneycontrol’s Managing Editor Nalin Mehta at the 69th Foundation Day of AIMA on February 21. 

He further explained that developing core AI models requires massive computational resources, which are expensive for the country. 

“You can have all the AIs in the world, but if you can’t get five people to work together and collaborate, then you cannot go anywhere,” Nilekani said.  

Challenges with AI 

Nilekani further directed the conversation to bring to notice the challenge with AI in a country like India which has massive population with different languages. He emphasised that what one needs is to make sure that AI reaches to the end-user affordably.  

“If we want a farmer on Odisha to tap an AI agri app and get a response in her native tongue to improve his productivity, can that be done at one rupee per transaction? “That a whole different ballgame. And that that’s where we have to go.” 

AI use in 3 areas to leverage productive impact 

Nandan  Nilekani further listed three important AI applications that could have a multiplier effect on India. These are: AI in language, education and farming, which can massively impact India.  

“If every Indian could communicate with each other effortlessly through language, if every child can learn better with AI, and if a farmer can improve his earnings, its good enough,” Nilekani said. 

Given the vast diversity of languages and dialects in India, one effective way to bring AI to everyone is by enabling voice-based communication with the internet. This approach would greatly increase accessibility by removing the barrier of literacy, allowing users to interact in their native language. One example of this, he gives, is AI4Bharat, a non-profit initiative from IIT Madras, supported by Nilekani and the Indian government, which has developed the world’s largest database of Indic languages.  

In the field of education, improving children’s literacy and numeracy can make a significant difference. EkStep, another non-profit backed by Nilekani and his wife Rohini, has created tech-driven solutions to assess children’s learning progress in real-time, identifying their exact learning stage.  

Additionally, in agriculture, Nilekani is working on creating an open agricultural network designed to provide accessible agricultural knowledge, complete with reasoning and inference capabilities.