Indian Economy News

From finance to healthcare, India is adopting automation at a global pace: ET-ILC members

According to McKinsey report, automation is transforming economies and workforce – ~60% of all occupations have at least 30% of their activities that can be automated. In addition, there are jobs that are only possible with AI and ML as they’re beyond human capabilities. Amid global Covid-19 pandemic, industries relied on automation for medical research that had to be accelerated or algorithms had to be tweaked remotely to carry out banking transactions. Data science platforms can analyze over trillion data points in real-time and provide actionable solutions – like data management, predictive maintenance or building new products.

Automation in business is inevitable and Covid-19 has only accelerated it across the globe. Instant decisions are made by industrial robots and it is made possible by companies such as Qualcomm with their robotics systems such as RB3 and RB5. Autonomous cars, augmented reality, virtual reality, drones that can scan large chemical vehicles to spot potential problems – Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride and XR platforms can make all that happen.

Mr Rajen Vagadia, Vice President & President, Qualcomm India & SAARC, said, “Innovations and technologies that Qualcomm brings to the globe, we now bring to India, concurrently. India is at that moment where the desire, the push, the policy, the inclination, the demand from consumers, is all pushing us in the right direction. There are examples of technology implementation in India which are probably far better adopted and commercially deployed, than what you would get to see in developed countries like Japan or North America”.

Automation technologies have been implemented across industries and the monetary gains have been immense. For example, Netapp’s ONTAP AI, in partnership with NVIDIA, is an integrated architecture that leverages supercomputing, state of the art storage and CISCO networking to provide a platform that can be used by any industry. In medical industry it is used in genome sequencing. The first genome project took a decade and cost billions of dollars. With Netapp and NVIDIA’s technology, the same work has been cut down to hours without compromising on security or accuracy.

To compare the level of automation that Indian firms have achieved across sectors, India is not far behind developed economies in sectors like finance. “In order to achieve digital transformation, AI powered digital disruption is a must. BFSI is ahead in digital transformation agenda, followed by healthcare with the use of AI in predictive analysis and diagnosis.

Mr Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior VP and General Manager APAC, NetApp stated that the third area witnessing the growth is AI powered bots. This will help them cut costs on customer service but also improve customer experience. Manufacturing and retail sectors are also looking into it.

In the last few months, many companies have relied on their India centres for seamless operations. Even through the lockdown, they had to provide some services without disruption. For example, insurance firms, to collect documents from customers. Banks had to accommodate the change made about the new guidelines on moratoriums and execute transactions. The US announced the Small Business Assistance Program where small businesses were given loans and the banks had to disperse credit according to that. For all this, these companies relied on the cognitive automation products of a firm like Automation Anywhere through which bots were able to execute a large amount of data processing, validations and transactions, for its ability to automate~90-95% of the work and the applications could be modified and triggered remotely.

Mr Milan Sheth, Executive Vice President, India Middle-East and Africa, Automation Anywhere stated,
“We just finished our half-yearly review and saw that many companies have started using our solutions. Most of them were companies that were on the fence and have started implementing our services in a phased manner. We are seeing an interest from customers adopting bots undertaking process discovery, intelligent data capture and embracing cloud native bots. What we saw was that the utilisation of our software went through the roof. A company that was at 60% utilisation has touched 95-98% utilisation.”

For the auto sector has not reduced its R&D spends. Manufacturers across the globe continue to invest in autonomous vehicles. Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division which relies on the auto sector for a large part of its revenue and serves more than 3000 customers in the ADAS space (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) says the development of autonomous vehicles in India needs to be faster. Overall, for India to develop as a manufacturing hub, automation is essential in all sectors because labour costs can longer be an effective differentiator.

Mr Sridhar Dharmarajan, EVP & MD – Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, India and MSC Software Indo-Pacific stated, “earlier when manufacturing shifted from developed countries to developing countries like China and Vietnam it was for cost effective labour. Now labour costs in these countries are also going up. With many of these autonomous factories you can create manufacturing centres in developed countries itself. If I can manufacture parts with lesser people, why should Germany offshore manufacturing to any of these developing countries per say. It is important for us to get into this technology and show that we are competitive not only in terms of reducing costs but also increasing quality and we realise that we need to automate these things,”.

Another critical element, is connectivity, especially in the post Covid-19 era. When it comes to updating existing networks without a dramatic shift in hardware architecture, automation plays a key role. For telecom or internet connectivity, the capability to reroute traffic without disruption can happen only if you have a complex web of networks so that you are able to reroute the traffic without downtime. An investment in adaptive networks will lead to lower outages, less complaints and better experience.

For Ciena, a networking systems, services, and software company, which has a large market share in India, the automation side of the business – a division called Blue Planet – is key.

Mr Rajesh Nambiar, Chairman and President, Ciena India, “Intelligent automation enables our customers to build networks that can adapt by using artificial intelligence to predict and proactively avoid up to 95% of network outages. This approach enables our customers to significantly reduce service disruptions and improve customer experiences”.

The National Artificial Intelligence Strategy highlights that by 2035, AI is expected to raise India's annual growth rate by 1.3 trillion and India will become the world's AI garage, exporting goods from the social sector to other emerging markets. Automation technologies will gradually be implemented by the government, the private sector and academia, with tech companies leading the way.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.