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Participating in a panel discussion on “How AI, GenAI are powering digital transformation across sectors in India”, Roopa Basrur, vice-president of Global Safety Medical Writing at Parexel, a Durham, North Carolina-based biopharmaceutical services company, said workflow automation, robust decision-making, and search and retrieval of data are the areas where AI’s impact has been the most in the pharmaceutical industry.

Basrur emphasised the use of AI in medical writing as well, which includes using data to determine whether a drug is safe for use or if there are warning signals.

“So, we actually have developed an in-house literature review tool that helps to do exactly what you were talking about, that is cutting down the amount of time spent in drug research and drug safety,” said Basrur.

Moving to an industry that embraced “digital” from the get go, Abhishek Ravi, chief information officer (CIO) at Mumbai-based Indian fantasy sports platform Dream Sports (Dream11), said AI technology was ever-evolving for him and not an overnight wonder. “AI has definitely been a very important factor for us to reduce our costs,” said Ravi.

AI-led digital transformation

The Dream11 CIO said the fantasy gaming platform, which according to Ravi saw a traffic uptick of 42% compared with the previous year, would have faced issues pertaining to scale if it had not adopted AI-led digital transformation.

“We at any point of time have more than 200 experiments running on our platform and all those platform experiments are being powered by AI with different machine learning models,” said Ravi.

The former Infosys employee said that intelligence had become a commodity for all to use, which eliminated competition between his tech and non-tech teams.

Surfing the digital wave was not that tough for Sushil Ostwal, vice-president – Project Head Data Science for Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd, either.

AI in finance

Ostwal, representing the financial services industry on the four-member panel, was also part of an industry that is an early adopter of technology. For him, the “quick wins” were the key.

“There’s lots of data, technology was in place, but getting the data together, putting the team together and getting the confidence of the leadership that the data science and AI can bring about value or the business outcome, we started with that,” said Ostwal.

The former Accenture manager said his team then looked to scale data infrastructure and parallelly looked to build a team that could aid in “productionising” the data, be it structured or unstructured data, so that the digital transformation journey did not slow.

From productionising of data for financial services to producing glass containers carrying vodka and perfumes, the ball tagged “digital” and “AI” at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit, rolled to Sudip Mazumder, who is the global chief digital & information officer of PGP Glass, a Mumbai-headquartered glass packaging company.

AI designing products

Mazumder, representing the manufacturing industry, spoke about AI’s use in designing bottles. He used AI to design a bottle shaped like a stiletto, which is a shoe with high heels made popular in 18th century France, after drawing inspiration from renowned Barcelona-based fashion and fragrance brand Carolina Herrera’s perfume named “Good Girl.”

“The way it (AI) is creating the design concept, I’m totally amazed and I am talking about my level. I am not talking about Open AI or Microsoft or Gemini,” said Mazumder. 

On the skill availability to undertake AI deployment, Basrur and Sushil Ostwal agreed on the importance of prompt engineering.

“Every company must train their workforce in AI and Gen AI, and must begin with prompt engineering because that is the starting piece, I would say,” said Ostwal.

Basrur also pointed at the importance of getting a “human in the loop” and a human’s level of attention before the final work goes through.

While keeping humans at the fore was a point raised, Mazumder threw light on the churn amongst those specialised in AI and Gen AI functions.

“This is a reality today that we are facing. Every time I am training new employees on AI and Gen AI, 33% of those new guys after one year have vanished,” said Mazumder, adding that these employees go where demand for small language models is high.

The threat permeated to cybersecurity as well. On this front, Ostwal said that companies are putting safeguards in place to protect their systems from breaches and violations.

The panel discussion came round circle with all four panelists expressing scope for AI and Gen AI.

Ravi on the online gaming front said that AI brought about many possibilities to his team in keeping counterfeit customer requests in check and also to understand patterns of the game while recognising unfair practices.

Mazumder on the other hand, expressed scope for AI and Gen AI-led modernisation in the robotics field.

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Published: 24 May 2024, 10:27 PM IST