New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Digital India’ call provided a timely push to business transactions by encouraging corporates to switch over to online work, use computerisation for speedy delivery and facilitate an outreach to customers that was not so easy to achieve earlier.

An ultimate advance of Information Technology symbolised by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now sweeping the business world in a manner that makes it necessary to administer a word of caution to all concerned against presuming that AI is the quick-time panacea for all their problems - big and small.

The important point here is that India on its way to becoming the third largest economy in the world in the foreseeable future, was benefitting a great deal from the strategic initiative of speeding up with “digitisation”. This policy flowed right from the top and gave this country a significant competitive advantage in today’s globalised world enabling it to move ahead of others in the “knowledge economy”.

India was a leading power and a storehouse of talent so far as IT was concerned and it will not be presumptuous to conclude that it will guide the world in the area of AI applications, too. These applications will expedite growth, improve efficiency and also take care of the issues of security that ‘digitisation’ would create for all stakeholders. There cannot be a one-fit for all, however a progressive understanding of the specific needs of an organisation, will go a long way in giving that particular business a competitive advantage.

Artificial Intelligence will never replace human jobs completely. It can free human hands of routine tasks that do not bank on creativity, strategic thinking and leadership qualities. A company that makes its employees do their jobs better or “more swiftly” than earlier, is adding to their “efficiency” by improving the output per unit of “time”- time being a recognised “resource” now. This does not necessarily entail laying down any part of the workforce- the new requirement is to make the existing manpower more productive.

This is not all that easy to achieve since it calls for deep planning for “customising” the AI applications to the employees’ tasks and duties. AI is adopted for creating business value and this has to be done in an innovative and ethical way to win customers’ confidence.

Human intelligence and imagination are needed while planning for an AI application- it can be said, therefore, that AI is a “product” not a “substitute” for the human mind. AI aims at enhancing operational efficiency and has to be built into the concerned “processes”. Its validation takes time and cannot be fixed in a moment.

AI applications also get linked to a possible organisational resetting, training regimen and investment of time because they worked for long-term advantage - often altering the decision-making protocols.

It is advisable to start with AI applications for small management projects and make them a part of the evolution of the larger organisational growth. It has to be understood that AI lays the path of steady progress and cannot be “ordered” to produce instant results except in the area of ‘data analytics’ where algorithms can be devised to read the “patterns” for further deductions and “machine learning” introduced to help a certain degree of “automation”.