As companies grapple with a changed reality and ever-evolving models, the question they are facing is how to adopt artificial intelligence in a way that is profitable, ethical, and not too disruptive for employees.
Discussing this with NDTV's Vishnu Som at the IND.AI summit on Wednesday were Jason Oxman, President and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council; Jeff Burke, VP, Business Development & Partnerships at Replit; Aloke Bajpai, Chairman, MD & Group CEO of Ixigo; and Ivana Bartoletti, Global Chief Privacy & AI Governance Officer at Wipro.
Aloke Bajpai said Ixigo has already integrated AI to help with trip planning and they don't just recommend restaurants but even the specific dishes that can be ordered. Bajpai said that, as part of their AI-first customer experience stack, almost 90% of the voice calls that they receive or make are end-to-end AI. This helped during the IndiGo crisis in December, when thousands of flights were cancelled, and the company made over 1.5 lakh calls using AI to inform customers about the status of their flights and help with refunds, which would have been impossible to do in a short span without using those tools.
On using AI in corporate governance, Ivana Bartoletti said the adoption of generative AI was rapid because it was accessible. "Very suddenly, a lot of people started using these tools. Across the world, organisations started to figure out how they would handle this and there were fears about copyright and data leaks. Guidelines were issued. Employees wanted to use it but they were also concerned about whether these tools would cost them their jobs," Bartoletti recalled.
The Privacy and AI Governance officer at Wipro said it is important for companies to take employees along, as responsible businesses. Wipro, she said, trained employees across the board on using these tools and taught them what to trust and distrust in terms of AI-generated output.
Jeff Burke of Replit, which lets people build apps and sites with AI, gave a demo using his company's tools and generated a website of places people coming to Delhi for the summit could visit during their stay.
"But with great power comes great responsibility. There are ways to teach this agent what should and should not be built. It's very powerful and it's getting better, and I am very excited about it," he said.
Jason Oxman said human beings are always in the equation when AI tools are deployed, and it is important that this continues. The President and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council said while collaboration between countries and companies on AI may seem counterintuitive, it has already been seen in the smartphone space and everyone will benefit from uniformly accepted international standards.
Bajpai pointed out that the internet democratised access to information, and AI will do the same thing for intelligence.
"What this presents is a unique opportunity to work with these models to diffuse the abilities of this intelligence to the end user who may have a very unique problem statement... AI gives you the power to preempt problems and reach out to customers," he said.
