Indian IT firms lead APAC in AI Infrastructure: Report

Indian IT leaders are the most confident in their IT infrastructure's readiness for artificial intelligence (AI) technology, according to a new report published on Monday, which polled IT leaders’ on their organisations’ AI readiness across the Asia Pacific region.  

According to the technology firm Equinix’s 2023 Global Tech Trends Survey, more than eight out of 10 IT leaders surveyed in India (85%) believe that their existing IT infrastructure is ready for the demands of AI, whereas only 56% in Asia-Pacific have certainty about the ability of their infrastructure for AI. 

The report comes at a time when the industry saw significant strides in AI adoption across the enterprise and government sectors. And despite AI tools and technologies being around for a long time, 2022 has been the year when generative and conversational AI became mainstream. OpenAI offerings like ChatGPT and Dall.E-2 further enabled more people to experience the power of AI. 

The survey further said that in the last one year or so, almost all industry sectors in India have seen an AI uptake, with more than 90% of the IT decision-makers polled in India seeking to gain from AI and already using or planning to use it across multiple key functions. Organisations are most likely to be using AI, or planning to do so, in IT operations (93%), followed by e-commerce (93%), and customer experience (92%), showed the study. 

The study further showed that quality control and management (73%) is the most popular area for digital twin, a virtual representation of a real-world entity or process, among Indian IT leaders. This is followed by operational performance optimisation (63%), product development and re-design (56%), predictive maintenance (54%), systems planning (51%), and logistics planning (47%). 

To be sure, other studies in recent times have also reflected on the enthusiasm shown among Indian businesses in AI adoption. According to a new report published earlier in June by global consultancy firm PwC, Indian companies are showing an upward trend towards adopting analytics and AI with a current implementation rate of 54%, with business leaders saying that greater innovation and faster time to market will help them remain competitive with the help of AI adoption. 

Another study released by the Stanford AI Index 2023, ranked India as fifth in terms of investments received by firms offering AI-based products and services in 2022. AI startups in India received a total investment of $3.24 billion, surpassing countries such as South Korea, Germany, Canada, and Australia. However, India is still behind the US, China, the UK, and Israel in terms of AI investments received, it said. 

Nonetheless, the widespread adoption of AI solutions in India is being hampered by severe roadblocks, as the Equinix study showed, IT leaders named several factors that would deter them from adopting a newer technology, such as AI. An increase in OPEX costs was cited as the biggest issue (46%), followed by a lack of internal knowledge (42%), slow implementation (37%), and a negative impact on reputation (25%), it stated. 

The PwC study also mentioned that AI adoption comes with its share of challenges, such as the cost of investment in digital technology, lack of planning for aligning digital transformation with the organisation’s objectives and implementing these digital technologies is a bigger problem. 

Notably, with many companies betting on generative AI, Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and chief executive of Salesforce India, in an interview with Mint, published on 20 June, believes that the pricing of generative AI tools will be critical to unlock its business potential. Organizations also have to have a certain amount of digital maturity to be able to be successful while using generative AI, unlike individuals, since you are trying to get intelligence out of data in a manner that will give you deep insights, she said in the interview. 

Overall, the Equinix study showed that Asia-Pacific remains a strong region that would contribute around 70% of global AI growth in 2023. It further confirmed that 58% of Indian businesses working in this space are planning to expand to new countries in the next 12 months.  

According to a report published in June last year, by IT body Nasscom jointly with consultancy firm EY, the adoption of AI by Indian enterprises can add $500 billion to India's GDP by 2025.