Making India an AI first nation — from classrooms to boardrooms

With one of the youngest populations in the world and a thrust on technology, India has a unique human capital advantage to harness artificial intelligence for significant economic and societal benefits. Empowering people with AI skills will be a foundational step in India becoming an AI-first nation.Demand for AI skills is far outstripping talent supply, placing India in a unique position to leverage its demographic advantage. AI skills have emerged as one of the key considerations for jobs globally, as organisations look to scale their businesses with AI.

Given gen AI’s universal applicability, organisations across industries will have to build a robust and inclusive talent pipeline with future-ready skills to unlock productivity, efficiency and innovation to stay competitive.

Earlier this year, the global population exceeded eight billion people. Today, one out of every six people on earth live in India. AI is key to India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and every day, the question remains: How and what should be done to put AI in the hands of everyone?

As technology changes, the work to govern AI responsibly must keep pace. Aligned with the ‘India AI Mission’ and ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’, public and private sector will need to come together to democratise access to AI skills. We need to adopt a skilling-first approach to AI to ensure our citizens can participate and thrive in an AI economy.

This requires a three-tiered approach in building skills from classrooms to boardrooms: 1) Building AI skills at the grassroots; 2) Enhancing AI fluency in government; and 3) Empowering organisations with a future-ready workforce. AI skilling can help transform India’s global competitiveness and turbocharge our growth and development.

Fluency at the grassroots

Empowering communities at the grassroots with AI fluency can spark innovation at scale, enabling people to benefit from AI’s advances. Non-profits, in collaboration with industry and government stakeholders, can play a major role in driving AI fluency at the grassroots. They can provide AI skilling resources and technologies, support with funds and technical assistance for building and scaling programs that drive social impact.

A non-profit organisation SEEDS is leveraging gen AI to help vulnerable people in slums understand the dangers of heat waves and protect themselves. Sunny Lives, the AI model that helped generate heat wave risk information for around 125,000 people, has seen many of the at-risk people come up with innovative home-grown solutions to reduce heat impact, reinforcing how AI skills are helping unlock human ingenuity and improve lives.

Agriculture is another important case. Farmers face challenges like unpredictable weather conditions, uncontrollable pests and diseases, loss of yield, soil degradation and limited connectivity with buyers/sellers. We need solutions that facilitate data collection from satellites, weather providers and sensors. Farmvibes.AI, for instance, leverages AI to provide valuable insights for farmers on soil moisture, temperature, humidity, pH and other parameters. Additionally, Agripilot.ai provides farmers with actionable insights for growing food more sustainably. These innovations empower farmers with data-driven tools to enhance productivity and sustainability in agriculture.

Organizations and industry can play an enabling role in seeding the next generation of AI innovators by collaborating with education institutions to train students in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. By imparting skills to increase representation of women in AI, cloud and cybersecurity, the industry can play an enabling role in building a diverse and inclusive talent pool.

From developing AI solutions for multilingual communication barriers to enhancing agricultural productivity through data-driven insights, strategic investments in human capital can yield substantial dividends for development.

The writer is president, Microsoft India and South Asia. All views expressed are personal.