NDTV Summit: Experts On How AI Is Transforming Healthcare, Workforce

Artificial intelligence has a bright future in India and one of the areas where it can have prolific use is medicine, agreed a panel of experts at the NDTV AI Summit today. 

Gaurav Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Gabit, who was part of the panel, said bringing all data about the human body on a single platform can help monitor health in ways that can increase longevity. 

This is essentially what Gabit does by tracking 150-plus markers through a smart ring that can be brought online, he said. 

"It essentially exactly knows when my heart goes out of rhythm... if you play that data out over a period of time and then use multiple parameters to coordinate what's happening inside your body, you can actually really figure out what's happening," he added. 

Gabit is designed to be a longevity platform where 150-plus markers can be brought onto just one platform and tracked by a wearable ring. 

"That's unique globally, because until now, your ring data or your wearable data was sitting on some other platform, your blood data was sitting on some other platform, your glucose monitoring was sitting on some other platform, and your basic metrics were also sitting separately, sitting in silos, not talking to each other. But the fact about science and biology is that all this data is interconnected. 
They all feed off each other. They actually tell a common story. So we built Gabit in a way where you can track all of this through a smart ring, through blood test on one platform.

Gabit, he added, has built its AI engine, which looks at all this data, historical blood reports, and tries to find out which blood marker might be hampering sleep, or vice versa. 

AI, likewise, can help track an individual's medical journey, calculate the risk for insurance companies and decide on a premium.

Manu Lavanya, Senior Director and Chief Operations Officer of Axis Max Life Insurance, said this is not a possibility for a distant future but is happening already. 

"The wellness proposition is getting integrated completely into the life or the health proposition. Which means there are products today that will give you an insurance on life, for example, and they will have either an additional bonus or a payout based on the health metrics," he said, reiterating "The products exist today".

Asked how one can remain relevant and profitable in this changing environment and leverage artificial intelligence, Vikram Chopra, Co-founder and CEO of Cars 24, said certain areas of marketing are being taken over by AI. 

This, he said, is also having an effect on the workforce, often shrinking it drastically. 

"Our engineering team, not too long ago, was almost 600 people. It has come down to 200. Just a few weeks ago, my team gave me a demo of a platform that they said would take them three months to build and a team of at least six or seven was built by them over three weekends with no human beings. Like he didn't even write a line of code. He just prompted AI and later got AI itself to check the code that we had written," he said. 

"I myself, 12 months ago, had a founder office... And I had a few people who worked directly with me on research, on analysis, on business updates.  All of them have moved now into the business roles. I have nobody.  I don't have an assistant.  I don't have a founder office because these agents are my office," he added.

Asked about the ethical side of AI, Karthik Rajaram, Country Lead and GM India, ElevenLabs, said, "We essentially look at three things and that's not an afterthought. It is trust, transparency and traceability... You have got to build all of those things into the platform, the guard-rails and things like that," he said. 

He said while they are trying to have the consent aspect in-built, regulations are also required to establish order in this respect.