India can Lead the World into the Fourth Industrial Revolution: World Economic Forum

Technological advancements have not only changed the way we work, shop, entertain, and interact as a society but has also paved the way for the fourth industrial revolution. Numerous technological innovations have disrupted the economic landscape and are opening up opportunities and challenges in the process.

Benefits and Challenges

Talking about opportunities first, technologies like artificial intelligence enable businesses to use volumes of data to their advantage. In terms of business growth, the insights gained can be used to offer differentiated services through hyper-personalization. Governments can address social challenges including food security and work towards efficient use of energy and resources, thereby improving the standard of living and achieving sustainable growth.

However, deployment of these technologies at scale is currently a major challenge. For instance, to efficiently deploy AI for multiple use cases, the algorithms need to be trained accordingly. This requires large data sets that can be used for training purposes. Even though algorithms are available in the open source world, data is mostly proprietary and privately held by large organizations. The World Economic Forum reports that even with China amassing large amounts of data, only a miniscule 0.5% of the world's data is available for analysis.

India, the Trailblazer

The World Economic Forum believes that with its inherent diversity, complexity, and scale, India is placed uniquely to design policy frameworks that can help “promote democratization and distributed ownership of such data that can drive innovation in AI at a large scale.” In fact, in its report, the World Economic Forum states that more than half the companies (58%) using AI in India are doing it at scale, much ahead of the US (32%), UK (35%), and the global average (36%).

Data sets from a vast population across varied languages, dialects, regions, religions, castes, sects, and other categories can be used in numerous possible ways to train and simulate algorithms. The report reposes confidence that India can lead the world into the fourth industrial revolution saying “what works in India - with its inherent diversity, complexity and scale - will work in the world.”

The article has been written by Neetu Katyal, Content and Marketing Consultant

She can be reached here.