India adopts AI Solutions amid Covid-19: Report

Another one of the Covid-19 impacts now includes organizations in India, increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as a business strategy to grow and overcome the challenges brought on by the pandemic.

According to a report published on Wednesday by PWC India, the use of AI in India showed a 45% increase, the highest among all countries. In comparison, the US recorded s 35% rise, UK 23%, and Japan 28% after the virus outbreak. It also reported that 94% of the organizations now believe that AI will help create more opportunities instead of being a threat to their industry.

The report also states that around 70% of enterprises surveyed by PWC India adopted AI compared to around 62% last year. However, when it comes to scaling up AI across the organization, India still lags behind global firms, with only 5% doing so compared to 25%around the world.

According to the report, the growing AI adoption is due to the shift in buying behavior and new business challenges. For instance, during this social-distancing era, AI-enabled use cases like contactless sales and delivery have gained traction. AI solutions are also being used to enforce best practices and make the workplace safer.

Organizations are now using AI in various manners to help their businesses grow by using AI-based predictive and prescriptive tools to make sense of current data and using AI-based digital twins to build resilient supply-chain and operations and avoid business disruption.

As compared to challenges faced in 2019, which were more technical and were limited to the inability to explain the model and lack of good quality data, the challenges in 2020 revolve around measuring the business value of AI implementations.

“The far-reaching consequences of a global pandemic have driven organizations to balance the competing priorities of safeguarding the health and ensuring business continuity. AI is now regarded as a key enabler for organizations to repair (emerge from the present crisis), rethink (transformation plan) and reconfigure,” Sudipta Ghosh, Partner, and Leader- Data and Analytics, PwC India said in a statement, according to LiveMint.

Further, the report also highlighted that sectors with the highest disruptions caused by Covid-19 adopted AI solutions in a more definitive manner. In the travel and hospitality sector, 89% of firms have implemented AI in some form to look at solutions to reconfigure business processes and offer contactless experiences. Other sectors where AI adoption has been higher included telecom, medicine, and tech with 86% adoption, financial services with 82%, and pharma with 73%.

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