AI is India’s growth accelerator; would call it naya daur of Digital Bharat: IBM’s Sandip Patel

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, India and South Asia, IBM

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia, said artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be India’s growth accelerator, as the company is looking to expand its focused strategy on hybrid cloud and AI in the country.

Citing a recent IBM study on Global AI adoption index, Patel said that with 59 percent of Indian companies deploying AI, the country’s AI adoption has become the highest across all geographies surveyed.

“We are witnessing India's digital renaissance. I like to call it the Naya Daur of Digital Bharat. And each one of you here are propelling this charter, and IBM, together with you, is committed to innovating in India, for India, and the world,” he said while speaking at the technology giant’s flagship event IBM Think in Mumbai on September 24.

He added, “AI is clearly India's growth accelerator…The good news is, India enterprises are actually outshining their global counterparts on AI deployment and adoption.”

Explaining the demand for having hybrid cloud, which involves a mix of using both on-premise data storage and public cloud, Patel said that over 30 percent of growing expenditure on cloud is getting wasted.

“Hybrid cloud architectures have seen massive adoption, with nearly 80% of IT decision makers who are operating in hybrid cloud environments…But nearly two-thirds of the companies report difficulty in managing these complex environments, and that’s a challenge that will continue to grow as businesses deploy generative AI across multiple clouds. Add to that, there is the difficulty in cost management,” he said.

Regulatory concerns

Speaking of seeing demand from customers for moving workloads from on-premise to hybrid cloud, Patel said in India, such decisions are also being driven by concerns around regulatory uncertainties as digital personal data protection (DPDP) law is still in works.

"Once the regulations land we will have more clarity in terms of data residency, sovereignty and the rest of it. Legislation will drive some of these nooks…In India, the regulated industries like financial services are all on prem. Even for non-critical workloads getting moved to the cloud, it is being questioned whether it is cost effective after the cloud credits. It all drives back to the scale of your data movement," Patel said.