AI will be the story for the next decade, says Info Edge CEO Hitesh Oberoi

Hitesh Oberoi, CEO and MD, Info Edge

Internet company Info Edge’s CEO and MD Hitesh Oberoi on February 27 said that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be the defining technology trend for the next decade. If entrepreneurs miss out on leveraging AI, they can get easily disrupted.

His comments come at a time when technology companies globally are aggressively looking to find use cases to leverage AI as curiosity among customers and their investors peak.

“This is going to be the story for the next 5-10 years for sure. The adoption is going to be that much and we have seen. Billions of dollars and investor money is going into AI startups. AI startups will see billions in valuation and they are going to be major disruptors,” Oberoi said, speaking at India Digital Summit 2024 in Mumbai.

He added, “Entrepreneurs today have to be careful because if there’s a new technology coming in and you are not leveraging it to your benefit, you could get disrupted very easily.”

According to Oberoi, though AI has been around for a long time, a lot has changed in the last two years. Whenever there’s a major shift in technology, a big company emerges. “We got Google when search happened, Meta when social network happened, and Apple when smartphones became popular. Now we are seeing ChatGPT and NVIDIA and so on,” he said.

As an internet and classifieds company, Info Edge runs 99acres.com, Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, and Naukri.com. It also has investments in startups such as Applect Learning Systems, Zomato, Kinobeo Software, and others.

The company reported its third-quarter earnings ended December 31, earlier this month. It posted a year-on-year profit of Rs 151.1 crore. In the same quarter of last year, the company reported a loss of Rs 116.5 crore loss.

The company performed well despite the ongoing sluggishness in the information technology (IT) sector hiring.

The company’s consolidated revenue increased by 6.4 percent to Rs 627.1 crore in Q3.