Responsible AI at nasscom - Industry Roundtable

Introduction

nasscom AI, in collaboration with Telangana AI Mission and nasscom 10000 Startups, hosted an industry roundtable on Investment and IP Creation in Generative AI Startups in Bengaluru on 20^th June 2023.

The roundtable brought together a good mix of generative AI start-up founders, investors, and CXOs from leading technology enterprises to exchange perspectives on a range of emerging focal points guiding key investment and business decisions in India's fledgling generative AI market:

Investment opportunities in generative AI (or GenAI)
Factors determining investment eligibility for GenAI startups
Levers for start-up differentiation in GenAI markets
Responsible AI maturity as a top investment and business priority
India’s GenAI readiness and global competitiveness

A list of roundtable participants is provided in the Annexure.

Key takeaways from the roundtable discussion

Investment opportunities in GenAI
- Participants discussed the growing willingness amongst Indian investors and venture capital firms to develop a deep understanding of the technology layers driving the GenAI boom in order to identify the right investment opportunities in GenAI.
- Participants highlighted some use cases of GenAI in advisory services, content creation, software code generation, and customer support - as potentially promising investment opportunities in GenAI
Factors determining investment eligibility for GenAI startups
- Participants discussed the need for startups to focus efforts on generating a strong value proposition for customers through the identification of new and compelling use cases of GenAI to attract potential investors.
- Participants suggested that even as compliance with responsible AI principles may not be treated as an investor mandate, start-ups should evaluate the demand for such compliance as part of their customer discovery while taking requisite measures to meet all applicable sectoral compliances.
Levers for start-up differentiation in GenAI markets
- Participants suggested startups to venture into local language model development to address untapped markets in the Indian context, thereby enhancing their prospects to provide a differentiated and scalable investment proposition to potential investors.
- Participants discussed the opportunity for startups to leverage existing open and closed large language models to service the growing demand from enterprise clients for customised solutions.
Responsible AI maturity as a top investment and business priority
- Participants highlighted data privacy and security, and model transparency, explainability, and fairness as top priorities of enterprise clients, particularly those operating in sectors like BFSI and healthcare. Participants also suggested federated learning as an effective technique to develop small language models in a privacy-preserving manner for enterprise use.
- Participants echoed the need for stakeholder sensitisation and training on compliance with responsible AI principles while emphasising that the latter should not be treated as an afterthought.
India’s GenAI readiness and global competitiveness
- Participants expressed concern over India’s tech services industry losing its global competitive advantage in software development support as businesses move to GenAI platforms for software code generation
- Participants suggested that the Indian industry should move beyond the application layer and build and leverage core IPs to generate globally competitive GenAI product and service offerings. To this end, participants also suggested the acute need for infrastructural support from the government.

ANNEXURE:

List of Participants

Abhishek Srivastava, Director, Endiya Partners
Amit Kumar Tyagi, Co-founder and CEO, TrueReach.ai
Amritendu Mukherjee, Co-founder and CTO, NeuroPixel.AI
Anil Viswas Ayatiraj, General Manager, Open Innovation - Startups, Samsung R&D Institute India
Ankit Bose, Head of AI, nasscom
Arjun Rao, General Partner, Speciale Invest
Francis Prashanth, Manager, Innovation GBS, Novo Nordisk
Geetha Adinarayan, Director, Client Engineering, India and South Asia IBM
Kritika Murugesan, Senior Director, nasscom 10000 Startups
Kunal Bhatia, Co-founder, Hexo
Madhavan Vasudevan, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific, IBM
Narendra Bhandari, General Partner, seafund
Naveen Yeri, SVP, Head of Enterprise Analytics and Data Science, Wells Fargo
Praveen Mokkapati, Lead - Telangana AI Mission
Puneet Lamba, Co-founder, Aspiro
Raghav Jayashankar, Senior Technology Partner, IBM
Raj Shekhar, Lead - Responsible AI, nasscom

Sivakumar Selva Ganapathy, Vice President, Software Engineering, Johnson Controls
Somshubhro Pal Choudhury, Partner, Bharat Innovation Fund
Sunil Maheshwari, Co-founder, ViXR.io
Suraj Chawla, Founder and CEO, brahmGAN
Tina Philip, Principal Director, Accenture Ventures and Open Innovation
Vibhor Saran, Co-founder and CEO, SyncSense
Vikram Ramasubramanian, Partner, Inflection Point Ventures
Vinit Bhansali, Senior Vice President, Orios Venture Partners