The answer is blowing in the wind
The George brothers’ Avatar small wind turbine is generating electricity for troops in Leh
As the world battled the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a greater emphasis on the use of technology and artificial intelligence to improve the performance of companies across various sectors.
“India has played a significant role in developing some innovative solutions during the pandemic. It has the potential to become a hub for Artificial Intelligence-based solutions,” said Romal Shetty, President, Consulting at Deloitte India.
A survey by Deloitte of over 2,700 executives found that AI has provided organisations with a competitive advantage and most organisations are aiming to harness its power on a broader level and increase investments across AI implementations.
A Deloitte-CII report titled- ‘The Age of With: Humans & Machines’ highlights, “Machines are transforming the way we do business and almost every component of our daily lives. It is not about people versus machines, it is about augmenting humans with machines to reach even greater heights, combining the intelligence and power of machines with the creativity of humans. The intelligence is artificial from machines, but the implications are very real.”
Job impact
On the impact on jobs, Prashanth Kaddi, Partner at Deloitte India said, “Some jobs will go but a new set of jobs will get created.”
The report stated that the year 2020 has seen a turning point when most of the population adapted to digital interactions to conduct their everyday lives, whether working from home, online schooling, or ordering groceries. “Yet the prevalence of digital interactions has left many of us pining for the days of in-person interactions,” it said, adding that in the next 18 to 24 months, in-person and digital experiences may become more seamless and intertwined.
Online and offline interactions will not be separate experiences anymore—the customer’s journey will be made up of in-person and digital elements that are integrated and intentionally designed to create a seamless brand experience that’s tailored to fit the individual customer’s behaviors, attitudes, and preferences.”
Future-focused manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and others are exploring ways to transform the supply chain cost center into a customer-focused driver of value. They are extracting more value from the data they collect, analyse, and share across their supply networks.
Some of these organizations are exploring opportunities to use robots, drones, and advanced image recognition to make physical supply chain interactions more efficient, effective, and safe for employees. Granted, transforming established supply chains into resilient, customer-focused supply networks will be a challenge, and for most organisations, it will be an ongoing journey—one of critical importance.
Some solutions developed for India and global applications include:
- A connected trucks solution was implemented for a global auto major to minimize truck downtime. IoT sensors collect live data from trucks on the road and send it to central servers. AI models run on top of that data to predict which parts of the truck would need repair and when.
- A banking player uses AI to study customer usage and transaction patterns to predict customer preferences, to design and offer personalised products and deepen relationships.
- An Indian conglomerate, leveraging Big Data and AI to process unstructured data like video grabs from across their plants to analyse patterns to alert them of potential security threats.
- A leading manufacturer combines Industrial robots with computer vision and AI, to help precision manufacturing and monitoring of equipment in inaccessible and hazardous areas of the plant.