By Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia

India’s embrace of AI presents a pivotal opportunity for the country’s advancement on the global stage. With one of the youngest populations in the world and a thrust on technology, India has a unique human capital advantage to harness AI for significant economic and societal benefits. Empowering our people with AI skills will be foundational to becoming an AI first nation.

Demand for AI skills is far outstripping the supply of talent, placing India in a unique position to leverage its demographic advantage and lead with AI skills. AI skills have emerged as one of the key considerations for jobs globally as organizations look to scale their businesses with AI. Given generative AI’s universal applicability, organizations 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 accelerate, the work to govern AI responsibly must keep pace with it. Aligned with the ‘India AI Mission’ and ‘Viksit Bharat 2047,’ public and private sector will need to come together to democratize access to AI skills. We need to adopt a skilling first approach to AI to ensure our citizens can participate and thrive in the upcoming AI economy. This requires a 3-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 organizations with a future ready workforce. AI skilling can help transform India’s global competitiveness and turbocharge our growth and development.

Building AI fluency at the grassroots

In Biwan, Vandna, an 18-year-old freshman, used the Jugalbandi chatbot to find scholarships. With her father unable to work and her mother a community health worker, Vandna juggled part-time teaching to fund her education. The chatbot provided her with a list of scholarships, eligibility criteria, and required documents, enabling her to apply and ease her financial burden. Such efforts towards AI skilling need to be extended to the wider society, especially to students and young girls and women who may be excluded or at a disadvantage due to the lack of access or awareness.

Vandna, a first-year university student, used the Jugalbandi chatbot to find out about scholarships she is eligible for. Photo by Nikhil Mehta for Microsoft.

Empowering communities at the grassroots with AI fluency can spark innovation at scale, enabling people to benefit from generative AI’s advances. Non-profit organizations 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 organization SEEDS is leveraging generative AI to help vulnerable populations 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 to unlock human ingenuity and improve lives at the grassroot level.

Agriculture is another important use case that innovation must serve. Farmers face challenges with 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.

Empowering organizations with a future ready workforce

Just as the industrial revolution set new productivity and efficiency thresholds and empowered people to do more, the age of AI and Copilots is creating new possibilities for every industry, sector, and domain. It is also opening new opportunities for the workforce that call for fresh skills and competencies.

91% of leaders in India believe their companies need to adopt AI to stay competitive, according to the Microsoft and Linkedin 2024 Work Trend Index. Leaders are looking to scale AI initiatives but are constrained by shortage of AI skills. Unlike traditional technical learning programs, AI upskilling is not limited to IT departments. AI today is relevant across roles and functions and everyone from leaders to business executives needs to be AI fluent to maximize the benefits of AI.

A trusted partner can demystify AI and help organizations take a skills-first approach to accelerating their AI journey. The 2024 Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index reveals 72% of Indian AI users are bringing their own AI to work, presenting an extraordinary opportunity for organizations to invest in the right tools and training to unlock efficiencies for employees and drive measurable business outcomes for the organization.

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 in future ready skills. By imparting skills to increase representation of women in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, the industry can play an enabling role in building a diverse and inclusive talent pool to strengthen the ecosystem.

Creating AI fluency at scale through these measures and investing in AI skilling is imperative for India to realize its full potential in the era of AI. From developing AI solutions for multilingual communication barriers to enhancing agricultural productivity through data-driven insights, harnessing unique and high-impact capabilities of AI will enable India to not just participate in the global technological revolution but to lead it, demonstrating how strategic investments in human capital can yield substantial dividends for national development. This is an unrivalled opportunity for the country to make an impact on the world stage with an AI-fluent population from the classroom to the boardroom that can solve for India and build for the world.

Disclaimer: This article was first published by The Economic Times in India on July 28, 2024.

Making India an AI-first nation with AI fluency from classrooms to boardrooms