Can India Build the Future of AI? Ashwin Raguraman on Innovation, Impact & Responsible AI

Ashwin Raguraman (0:00)

What does AI bring you? It brings you the power to solve some of the most complex problems that you couldn't earlier. If you think about the fact, and I do believe honestly at the point in time, AI will be able to diagnose a disease that people may have quicker and better than a doctor would.

Sanjay Puri (0:17)

Imagine we are 10 years into the future now. What is that one thing that you believe that we should get right today?

Ashwin Raguraman (0:25)

Definitely has to be that you start thinking today about how you will touch the life with AI of every citizen in the world. And for that, you need to put that diffusion infrastructure in place early because these things take time.

Sanjay Puri (0:44)

Hello and welcome to the Universal AI Awards. We are live here in Delhi and I have Mr. Ashwin with me. How are you doing? So how's it been so far?

Ashwin Raguraman (0:54)

Very good. Very interesting panel that we just had.

Had a good time on it. I hope the audience did as well.

Sanjay Puri (0:59)

Yes, I'm sure they did. I mean, we have a full house here today, which is incredible. So I'm going to jump right into your questions that I have for you today. Now, India has the opportunity to build AI solutions, not just for its own challenges, but for challenges in the world. So what do you think India needs to get right to turn that opportunity into meaningful, responsible innovation?

Ashwin Raguraman (1:23)

I think we are already doing a bunch of things. You're right, we should be solving global problems and not just India's problems, but we've got to make sure we do both, right? Which means that even Indian customers should get access to AI.

And I see that there's a lot of effort that is underway to help build the technologies that power AI, but there's also the other side, which is the adoption part of it, right? And tech doesn't mean scalable businesses or solution of problems, right? And if you want to do that, there's two things you've got to do, which is enable Indian technologies, which are in some cases world class, to really go out and access customers globally, and for those customers to look upon brand India as an AI sort of house, to be able to produce solutions which cater to their problems, right? And we've got examples of those, even sitting in my portfolio, but even outside of that, who are selling to global enterprise and we need to really showcase them. So that's one. But I think at the same time, you've got a big customer base which is there in India.

Our policy and our government has been taking a lot of initiative in the AI space through programs like the India AI Mission and so on to provide the infrastructure through GPUs and data and so on, to help enterprise and startups develop solutions. At the same time, if we go back to UPI, which is a big success as a technology out of India, what the government and maybe some of the other associated entities did well is to ensure that this got socialized and helped it actually get to market. And the adoption was in a sense almost, there was a tailwind that was provided by the government. So I think we need to shift focus now from just the build part to the adoption part and ensure that between customers like you, I or the nth person in the nth village in India, as well as enterprises in India are able to adopt and have reach to solutions that are getting built. Because then you're creating an India market, which then stimulates also the creation of these solutions and startups building for these problems.

Sanjay Puri (3:36)

Absolutely.

I would like to ask, obviously, AI is being used to bridge the gap between small businesses, and then you have these big cooperations who have exorbitant access to completely different systems and levels of AI. So do you feel like at some point this access to AI is being equalized, or is it increasing the gap between the few that have the power? And how would you want to approach that? What are your thoughts on that?

Ashwin Raguraman (4:09)

That's a very interesting paradigm or a problem to solve, which is, I think the first part is you make sure that you solve the problem for the customer, not just for the builder, right? Because you're thinking of AI enterprises and then startups. And of course, there are efforts to help startups, for example, get GPUs at a discounted cost and so on and so forth. But that's on the build side. And I want to today, like I did earlier, focus on the market side, which is, is that person the nth person who is in the nth village in India, able to access the same level of AI and have that touch their problems as much as it touches your and my problems, right? Which means, and I think there's a nice word that has been coined, which is AI diffusion.