VMware CEO Raghuram Concurs With Zoho’s Vembu, Says India Should Foster AI innovation As Part Of National Infra

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram on Tuesday said India should consider investing and fostering the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) models as part of the national infrastructure.

Speaking exclusively with BW Businessworld, Raghuram emphasised that monopolies by countries and competition around AI technology could become a contentious topic in the future. “(It’s) because national competitiveness is affected by the degree of utilisation of machine learning and AI models,” he said.

The VMware CEO said that the government does not necessarily have to build large models to compete with AI giants such as OpenAI and Google, rather, they can enable and support creation of these models as part of the national infrastructure.

“This can, very much, be considered to be a critical national infrastructure,” Raghuram said.

While he lauded the India Stack (which includes Aadhar, UPI, Digilocker and Account Aggregator), he said similar efforts could be made with the support of Indian government for AI innovation.

“Because this thing (AI) is going to be one of the most significant determinants of technological superiority,” he stressed. “And it's going to affect all forms of competitiveness, including economic, military and more."

Raghuram said that working on AI innovation at a national level will be “super-critical” as India aspires to be among the top three global powers in the world.

A recent report by Goldman Sachs Research said that Generative AI alone could raise global GDP by 7 per cent (or almost USD 7 trillion) and lift productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a 10-year period. This would mean that the wider AI market would add much more than USD 10 trillion to the global economy by 2030, as predicted by IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in 2022. 

Last week, Zoho Corporation CEO Sridhar Vembu signed an Open Letter, calling for stakeholders in the AI ecosystem in India, including IT researchers, policymakers, academicians in other disciplines, industry leaders, and members of the civil society. He urged the stakeholders to join the AI debate to help evolve a national consensus on how best to utilise AI to achieve India-centric goals.

Vembu said, “For a remarkably young country like India, with a median age of 29, AI offers a huge opportunity to raise labour productivity, build a knowledge society and further enhance our demographic dividend.”

He also called for an AI policy to be put in place to foster innovation in the space and prevent international monopolies around the technology.

A 2022 Bain & Company report says that India is the third largest contributor to global Artificial Intelligence (AI) talent. The country is responsible for 16 per cent of global AI talent. But the overall AI international markets are clearly dominated by the US and China. 

Last year, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang also vouched for India to be the best-positioned nation to cater to the world’s enterprise AI needs, citing the prowess of companies like Infosys, TCS and Wipro.