Research released today from Accenture reveals that artificial intelligence (AI) could add US$957 billion to the Indian economy by changing the nature of work to create better outcomes for businesses and society. The report, ‘Rewire for Growth,’ estimates that AI has the potential to increase India’s annual growth rate of gross value added (GVA) by 1.3 percentage points, lifting the country’s income by 15 percent in 2035.
“AI’s transformative power can be compared to the advent of computing itself, and there’s strong early evidence that AI can play a key role in unlocking socio-economic value in India. The time to act is now. With the right investments AI can create a flywheel effect ‘liberating’ people to create long term economic and societal value,” said Rekha M. Menon, senior managing director and chairman, Accenture India.
The report explores the strength of India’s AI innovation ecosystem relative to other G20 economies across five key pillars– Universities, Startups, Large Businesses, Policy makers and Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships. It studies the current state of activity, areas of opportunities and challenges, and finds that even with a tech-savvy talent pool, renowned universities, healthy levels of entrepreneurship and strong corporations, India lags on key indicators of AI development.
The research finds that major Indian technical universities have been pioneering fundamental research in AI, but are not doing enough to strengthen the AI ecosystem around them, unlike their global counterparts such as Cambridge and Oxford in the UK. It also finds that although AI startups have witnessed higher than average growth in India since 2011, and in 2016 ranked third among G20 countries measured by the number of AI startups, the size of funding received is substantially smaller than in the United States and China, reflecting the limited success of India’s AI startups in achieving scale so far.
