India will be global powerhouse of AI, says union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar

New Delhi: After China, India is likely to build its own AI to keep up with the frenzy of chatbots the world is seeing right now. Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the goal is to make India a global powerhouse of AI.

He said AI will be one that does not just stop at integrating foreign chatbots but build next-generation AI-based innovations to empower billions of citizens. Speaking to IANS, the minister said that AI is a "kinetic enabler" of the digital economy and the government will infuse more of this disruptive technology into its "India Stack."

"AI will certainly transform the digital economy and grow the business economy in the country. We are launching a very comprehensive programme called the INDIAai Programme and you will see more AI use cases via the India stack -- Aadhaar, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), DigiLocker, CoWIN, and more. AI, as I have said, is a 'kinetic enabler' of the digital economy and we want to be the global leader in AI," he said.

The Union Budget for FY24 has made space for three centres for AI at top educational institutions to work toward the vision of "Make AI in India" and "Make AI Work for India". The government is also expanding the INDIAai initiative in partnership with homegrown tech companies, startups, and academic institutions under a comprehensive AI programme.

The IT Ministry's natural language AI platform Bhashini's team is aiming at building a National Public Digital Platform for languages to develop services and products for citizens. It is creating a unifying architecture, underpinned by principles of open data and open source software, to enable contributions from the research initiatives and the ecosystem. Chandrasekhar said it will enable automated language translation.

The minister further said India Stack will become more nuanced, intelligent, and sophisticated in its next avatar, as more and more enterprises and countries across the world innovate and integrate, execute, and implement digital transformation.

He met Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates this week and said they had a "good, interesting conversation about India Stack and Artificial Intelligence (AI)."

According to a Nasscom report released last month, India currently ranks first in terms of Ai skill penetration and AI talent concentration. The country is also fifth in Ai scientific publications. India's 'AI Skills Penetration Factor' has been reported to be 3.09 - the highest among all G20 and OECD countries. Over 1,900 AI-focused startups are providing innovative solutions in the areas of conversational AI, NLP, video analytics, disease detection, fraud prevention, and deep fakes detection.