Rethinking Indian Tech: Can We Move Beyond IT Services with AI?
I am continuing my thoughts on what’s after AI for India.
When I recall how the software industry rose, it was the golden era after 2000. There was a dot com bubble, and for years the whole world was a little clueless on what was next… and then we witnessed glorious years for the IT industry.
Are we going through the same phase now?
India has done very well in the service industry and become the global hub to cater to customized software development services. Though India has an amazing past and history, it’s not reflected in our software industry. Except for a few Indian companies, everyone has taken the route of less risk and high margin “software services.”
It made me look at the data, was that a problem with money or something else?
When OpenAI was formed as a non profit foundation, it was started with around 100 million USD and a commitment of around 1 billion USD. When we look at some of the well known listed companies in India, they are giving multiple times that amount in dividends to their shareholders. Can’t we do something to keep a chunk of those dividends?
Use that amount for:
- R&D activities to improve human life
- Activities that may not give immediate monetary benefit, but where the impact can be huge
- Activities just to keep people engaged and learning
There can be numerous ways to use the money, but at the same time, I understand that when a company is listed, it has its own pressure to satisfy the board and its shareholder’s expectations. However, this can start small and may become a trend later on.
India has a rich cultural history and a diverse background. If we look at history and how people invested in technology and arts, we can see so many mesmerizing places and crafts. Where did we lose that temperament?
The benefits I am seeing here with AI are huge for India if we take it forward from here.
We have so many people coming from diverse backgrounds, and just as many problems across different languages, that we can take advantage of using AI to build solutions for them. Earlier, it was hard to work on a problem that serves a small number of people, but now the economic model has changed with AI. We can take a list of problems and their severity, and target solutions for them. If we are clear enough with that, we can solve many problems that were not solved for many, many years. Many software engineers can start working in this direction.
Another pressing question here is: What will IT companies that mainly depend on outsourcing look like?
- How can they ride this AI wave?
- What areas can they explore around AI?
One thing for sure everyone has to understand is that AI is not going anywhere. We have to accept it and start using it as our ally instead of an enemy. As long as we start to accept this, the journey can be fun.
We missed starting this from India due to a few reasons, such as a lack of drive to build non profit solutions, alongside hardware procurement and infrastructure setup challenges.
Still, many areas have unlocked here. Though we have not worked on foundation models, we can surely work on fine tuning and training models. Considering our vast and diverse population, this can be a huge advantage. No other country has such an advantage here. It can be useful in physical AI learning, too. We can solve our own problems in native languages. There will soon be a demand for modernizing legacy applications, as everyone knows that what they were neglecting or afraid to migrate can now be done with AI. If they don’t do it now, we will have fewer people available to manage old systems. We are all talking about LLMs, but for India, Small Language Models (SLMs) can also be the choice to solve specific use cases and offer affordable solutions. We can become the workforce for the world with Agents and AI ready solutions.
Just my random thoughts!