Artificial Intelligence — Choosing The Correct Learning Approach Based On Your Current Role

Almost every other day, either one of my past colleague, college friend or an online contact from LinkedIn will ask “I have been listening a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning, I have read few articles on the subject, attended some Udemy courses but I really don’t know which learning path to take”

It is difficult to give a structured answer.

Learning possibilities are endless. It is totally crazy to learn everything about artificial intelligence.

This field is so wide that it is easy to hit a roadblock because you started learning it in the wrong way (difficult way) without assessing your readiness.

Some people i know are thinking of joining months-long online/on-campus education programs while others have bought online subscriptions on Udemy and edX because these were heavily discounted. Those who are at executive level are getting their understanding on artificial intelligence by reading newsy type articles on Forbes, MIT Technology Review and other technology blog sites.

Complex emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) has potential to create entirely new business models. Sales, marketing, technology, support — leaders and employees from all domains, need to learn artificial intelligence — but differently.

How different learning approach and resources are application to different roles — let’s look at it here.

Different People, Different Levels, Different Domains, Different Learning Approach

Allow me to create three roles and chart a learning map around artificial intelligence skills they need to learn.

This article just shares high level learning approach and some visualizations as a QuickStart document.

1️⃣Role1: Executives and leaders — should be prepared to act quickly to make informed decisions on how to use artificial intelligence for their own business, or how to employ artificial intelligence to increase customer value propositions.

2️⃣Role2: Specialists from similar fields — having high level of information technology awareness around their domains, familiar with data, statistics and programming — but very new to artificial intelligence. Wants to do hand-on within a week after learning artificial intelligence.

3️⃣Role3: Experienced or fresh graduates — ready to transform/create a career out of artificial intelligence. People can spend around 20 hours per week in learning new skills for a career transformation.

1️⃣ Role1: Executive and leaders

In Mckinsey’s language, to prepare to act quickly executives need to stay ahead in artificial intelligence race. 🔗 Executive guide to AI will prepare leaders to understand what is artificial intelligence and machine learning. When to use which type and their business use cases.

Web pages are intuitively designed with more visualization and less verbiage so that executives can retain most of the content without getting in to the depth of each type.

Most industries are covered against where it is appropriately applicable

Even if you want to go a little deeper you will see that each type had business use cases stated.

These business use cases are very beneficial and directly enables business leaders to further talk to his peers for more actionable information.

A Little Deeper 💥 — For Executives and Business Leaders — Good To Have

It is critical to know how machine learning works and what is its relationship with artificial intelligence. Business leaders need to know how different types of machine learning algorithms affect and solve various industry problems.

It is also important to know how it is different from traditional way of solving problems using various information technologies.

PWC has this infographics that depicts the difference and relationship — at a very high level, but good enough for executives.

2️⃣ Role2: Specialists From Similar Fields

These people having high level of information technology awareness around their domains, familiar with data, statistics and programming — but very new to artificial intelligence. Such learners can do (and should do) hand-on projects within a week after learning basics of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

These specialists have capacity to learn more and in depth. Many of the roles, needed skills and business titles of the future are unknown to us. So, make sure you assess your interests and future roles before you make some commitment to yourself.

As I stated in my earlier blog you can start with beginners, then intermediate, afterward moving on to the expert level courses. Make sure you complete all projects and assessments. After completing learning, you need to build a few small projects, and gradually you will figure it out what you like most, what you can directly relate to your area of expertise

Learning Artificial Intelligence — Formal Education or Online Self-learning — Ph.D. or MOOC

The flowchart below is designed to give users a bit of a rough guide on how to approach problems with regard to which estimators to try on your data

2️⃣Hands-on on Azure Machine Learning Studio and Azure AI Gallery For Role2

Azure Machine Learning Studio has a large library of algorithms from the regression, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection families. Each is designed to address a different type of machine learning problem.

Azure AI Gallery enables Microsoft’s growing community of developers and data scientists to share their analytics solutions.

These will help you quickly build Azure AI Solutions from solution templates, reference architectures and design patterns.

Azure AI Gallery also has 🔗Jupyter Notebooks, integrated with Machine Learning Studio, provide a canvas for quickly running code, visualizing data, exploring insights, and trying out ideas

💥2️⃣Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Capabilities and Algorithm Cheat Sheet For Role2

3️⃣Role3: Experienced or Fresh Graduates

If you are ready to transform/create a career out of artificial intelligence skills and can spend around 20 hours per week in learning new skills, then let me share that this would be the most useful investment of your time.

Artificial Intelligence is an enormous field. It consists of multiple disciplines and a variety of tools and platforms. There is no limit to what these AI techniques can be applied across numerous domains and industries.

You need to assess what are your career objectives and interests? Do you crave to join research or academia and contribute or you prefer to build some great product/feature and launch it within next 18 months?

You have two ways to learn these emerging technologies:-
1️⃣Learn it yourself — MOOC at Udemy, coursera or edX
2️⃣Official academic qualification like Ph.D.

Chose MOOC (massive open online course) only if you can set a routine to learn every day — for months, and enjoy making your hands dirty playing with various AI tools.

Chose Ph.D. if you want to contribute back to the evolution of emerging technologies. Be warned that it could be laborious and you might not get quick returns. Premium university education could cost you huge and you may have to live away from home.

Career development and learning, both are no more a one time activity, it is now a life-long progress, and unique path for each individual.

University degrees from premium institutes will be always important but new learning methods with engaging content and virtual rooms solving real-world problems will give rise to superior, autonomous and futurist workers.

8 Smart Strategies For Your Future Ready Career

💥Career in Artificial Intelligence and Organization View For Role 1️⃣, 2️⃣ & 3️⃣

Small or big, organizations can’t ignore artificial intelligence. They will have 🔗Center of Excellence dealing with various emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, quantum computing, internet of things, cognitive computing etc. No matter, what your think of artificial intelligence but recent technological development associated with new patterns of globalization is threatening to create a new tomorrow — forcing businesses to re-imagine their products and services, realize business efficiencies and drive customer experience to an altogether different level. Be a part of this change take all possible initiatives to learn emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning.

Unlike any traditional approach a career in artificial intelligence can be realized in many constructs and in virtually all industries. Medical, military, art, research, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and transportation — all these industries need artificial intelligence skills. Another area of immense opportunities includes ethics, philosophy, policy making, and civic planning.

Industry changes are coming fast and we need to face the truth. You have this opportunity to re-invent your career by learning artificial intelligence. It will be challenging but at the same time highly rewarding for your future career

Artificial Intelligence - Choosing A Learning Approach Based On Your Current Role was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bathrooms in China are using facial recognition technology to limit how much toilet paper an individual can use. Bizarre or greatly advanced, whatever you call it but a real-world problem is getting solved with the adoption of technology. It is making the environment orderly and clean — and presenting a brand new experience to the toilet users.

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the global economy. PwC report says that Global GDP will be 14% higher in 2030 as a result of AI. The greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost), equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact.

Earlier I expressed about the challenges inhibiting India’s progress in the race of artificial intellegence. This article is a review on India’s latest initiative on Artificial Intelligence that is aimed to deal with how government is going analyze artificial intelligence opportunities and establish policy frameworks around AI technology and its adoption across different realms.

7 Reasons Why India Is Going To Lose The Artificial Intelligence Race

India’s Task Force for Artificial Intelligence

India just woke up to this AI and established a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. This task force bears an insight to embed artificial intelligence in India’s commercial, political and legal mindsets and processes to establish India one of the leaders of artificial intelligence rich nation.

This task force includes a mission to set up policies and legal framework around artificial intelligence technologies. This will consist of government, industry and research programs for five years.

Challenges in Deploying Artificial Intelligence Systems in India

India suffers a number of challenges in deploying AI Techniques. Report on India’s artificial intelligence task force talks about these issues

• Data collection, archiving and encouraging data availability with
  sufficient safeguards, probably via data marketplaces.
• Ensuring data security, protection, privacy, and ethical use via
  enabling frameworks, both regulatory and technological.
• Digitization of systems and processes with Internet of Things (loT)
  systems while ensuring safety from cyber-attacks.
• Deployment of autonomous products (robots, autonomous vehicles) after careful study and mitigation of any impact on employment and
  safety.

Important Highlights of India’s AI Task Force

• Alliance among academia, service industry, product industry, startups and government will further fuel the research and development of AI based products and services in numerous domains
• Methodologies to record data will be set up at governmental stage. This will facilitate produce clean and reliable data platforms that is fundamental to build effective AI based systems.
• Centers of Excellence will be established across the country. These COEs will help promoting interdisciplinary research across various domains. Such actions will promote deeper understanding of the opportunities of tailoring and AI based systems.
  These COEs will be used define various design schemes and risk mitigation policies.
• Large Data Integration Projects will be implemented that can drive multiple data streams enabling various digital data platform and protected data brokerage marketplace
• National Skills Development Corporation will design AI readiness index to measure AI skills and outline of the required skills to various education and employment systems.
  This will help establish the need for reskilling across numerous domains and geographies

Learning Artificial Intelligence — Formal Education or Online Self-learning — Ph.D. or MOOC

Looking Ahead

All stats support that US, China, Europe and Singapore will continue to be the biggest AI markets and research hubs for artificial intelligence.
There is no ambiguity that India is showing up with a bunch of AI based startups and there is abundance of VC activity in supporting multiple artificial intelligence based upcoming projects — but essentially India is yet hiding on service driven mentality.

Earlier I talked about various challenges that India has — inadequacy of AI data sets, drought of innovation and leadership, and missing education curriculum based on real world data/AI projects.

India should not miss the futuristic wave of opportunities.
So, this time let’s not play ‘catch up’ with China, or imitate some other artificial intelligence proficient country and lose ground, rather we should go back to the blackboard, work hard and grow with the disruptive powers of artificial intelligence

Taking a Stab at India’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From sorting cucumbers to curing cancers, Artificial Intelligence algorithms will not pause at anything. Google CEO recently stated that AI is more profound than electricity and firein his statement “AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire,”

For the past 30 years, technology outsourcing has generated massive employment for India, but now AI and Automation is changing the traditional IT Service Model. Indian outsourcing industry is under serious threat and is going to change sooner than we can think of.

We should not forget what Vineet Nayyar, former CEO of HCL Technologies once said

“ IT industry in India was built on the back of cheap labour”

Will India be a lead player in this game of AI or will India play catch-on and turn into a follower just to be in the game. No undue prejudice will be done if we say India has already missed the Bus.

1 — Lack of Government Policies/Support

US, China, Japan, Israel and a few of EU countries are heavily investing in AI technologies and developing mammoth plans around the prospect of Artificial Intelligence driven economy.

Based on PwC report the greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost), equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact.

India has few dozen startups in the field playing here and there, we will be short-sighted if we rely on these AI startups funded by VCs and carrying no long-term goals

In a decade or two from now, the future of India’s national security and economic progress might depend on such technological innovations. If India wants to leverage the potential of Artificial Intelligence, it is necessary for the government bodies to fixate on new policies for AI.

How open should we be for an AI research? Should we be concerned that there is too much of money flowing into advanced AI research by private sectors that government is not conscious of? How these AI research is value aligned to the nation’s bigger goals? AI policies for India should be inclusive of philosophy, ethics, security, and politics.

2 — Lack of AI Data Sets

Data is the fuel for AI, without data AI is nothing; Quality data set is instrumental in the accuracy and efficiency of any AI based solution. AI algorithms and machine learning systems need unusually large volumes of high-quality data to function efficiently.

The democratization of data is a significant step towards accelerating AI and without open data platforms and data policies how anybody would make a product, tool or platform that does disruption. If we don’t have open data that is machine readable then India’s Artificial Intelligence innovation is stalled forever.

If India has to create open data platform it has to look at various data resources, create guidelines for storing data and then create discoverable data platform — for the public consumption. All AI solutions be it prediction or demand forecasting, they all are based on the quality of data.

There is sufficient talent in India, and more than often innovation comes from the unlikely place; once India is prepared to build open data platform, there will be many new businesses that will become viable by exploiting new knowledge and insights.

Legal, technical and social requirements for an open dataset need to be defined in order to realize any social and business value

3 — AI is More Than Chatbots and Automation

Since 2016 there are dozens of AI startups, most are nothing more than the supplier of chatbots and RPA (robotic process automation); this is not even AI. Soon voice based AI assistants will take over AI chatbots.

Futurist AI based RPA will improve their own performance and make a complex decision trajectory based on quality datasets with little intervention or programming. Future of RPA market belongs to self-learning capabilities and in the lack of quality data sets, we can’t continually improve upon RPA.

4- India’s Paradox: Leadership

We can’t pursue any further what we have been doing since last 30 years — executing technology outsourcing projects from US, Europe, and other geographies because of our large pool of English speaking IT engineering graduates.

If India has to realize the goals of smart cities and Digital India, then there can’t be any better time in the future than now, if we don’t act now the gap between technologically advanced countries and India will expand further and within a few years from now India will turn into a technology laggard in the world where China will gain exponential influence because of technology adoption.

The baby steps in India’s Artificial Intelligence evolution are no more useful. India needs to accelerate the speed of innovation. Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy trashes AI as hype and said

“There is this whole thing about automation and artificial intelligence. That is much more hype than the reality, at least in the software services,”

Leaders of the private companies should come forward and think 10x instead of 2x, they should influence government bodies on the long-term values of AI-based innovation across all vital functions that public sector and government serves.

5 — The Great Decoupling

Exponential technological development brings in its own problems like stagnation of income and disappearance of the middle class — adequate to disrupt the cycle of prosperity. First time in the history, productivity and employment are not related and we are observing The Great Decoupling. Labor’s share of GDP had declined in 42 out of 59 countries, including China, Mexico, and India. We don’t know what the new ride will feel like. While creating open data platform we need to discover and create new markets — enabling employment of re-skilled labor

India has 4 million IT employee generating $150 billion in revenue. World Bank data estimates 69% of today’s jobs in India are threatened by automation.

The abundance of labor and very low (relatively) wages just mean that AI adoption will be slow in India. But this slowness won’t stick around long and we need to move forward on national level deliberate AI policies before we are late in the game. We need to bring in digital labor model while we say good bye to India’s dying cheap labor based IT service model

AI is an ingenious instrument that we need to explore for strengthening ourselves with the challenges that we will face in the near future.

6 — Not Futuristic Enough

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and Palantir once said

How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?

If you closely observe where we stand in realizing the target of 100 smart cities by 2020 it still appears to be a far-fetched goal. If we want to stay in the list of Top 5, we need to plan “AI for India” from the bottom up, by paying attention to India’s social, political, cultural, ethical and economic situations. This model need not be a Jugaad or copy-paste from some other country.

How you set up the game is more important than how you play it. If we don’t have leaders, evangelist, visionaries and futurist that can’t use Artificial Intelligence to augment our ever-greater capabilities, resources, opportunities, and achievements — then we must blame ourselves for our upcoming failures.

Technology is advancing faster than ever, faster than our need to innovate, swifter than we can adapt. If we want to make of use accelerating the growth of technology for solving some of the biggest problems we have today, then we need to think exponentially. We need more technology evangelist, visionaries, and digital futurists.

7 — Issues with Education

With this exponential growth in a technology where 1) Everything will be connected to the internet 2) Artificial Intelligence will change everything 3) Every company is becoming a technology company; China is already leaping ahead in the AI race on many levels (research, investment, and government policies). India is just waking up to the AI morning. Academics, researchers, government and private investors have to realize the potential of Artificial Intelligence for India’s growth.

Our educational system needs to be updated to acquire and enhance skills required to cope with the changes AI brings along with it. While online education helps Indian students to get access to a world-class learning experience but traditional higher education is simply not feasible due to financial constraints, and infrastructure is still an issue.

We need an education system that instills skills and provide opportunities for students to use these skills as they learn. The system should not impose “first complete school, then try IIT, then try MBA”.

India produces thousands of engineers per year but we still lag in innovation. AI requires a mindset of innovation, research, and experimentation. New education policies, system, and curriculums need to be made future ready and adaptive enough to suit Artificial Intelligence-based future economy.

Risks of Not Advancing in Artificial Intelligence

India’s initiatives like Start Up India ,Make in India and Digital India might benefit India constitute a truly Digital India and it is important to have Artificial Intelligence in the agenda; but I cannot resist drawing my readers’ attention to the irony they will observe upon visiting these websites. Artificial Intelligence Task Force, constituted by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India has nothing to offer for the public community.

After reading this article I am afraid that you may be left inquiring about what is the author’s argument here. My judgment is that India hasn’t produced big technology players; till now current large IT players were able to create jobs in India for serving customers outside of India which is getting harder and harder with AI technology disruption. If we don’t see any large AI initiative now with huge intellectual and financial investment India will suffer its competitive technology position resulting in the bad impact on the economy — The AI-based technological space will be filled in by Chinese firms.

India should not miss the futuristic wave of opportunities. It should go back to the blackboard and labor hard rather than protecting underperforming legacy IT and business models

7 Reasons Why India Is Going To Lose The Artificial Intelligence Race was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Future of career is personal.

From “Job for Life” to “Career for One”, technology has changed everything. In today’s knowledge-driven economy, along with disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence and automation if you are getting swamped by your current job position you are on a sure pathway to mediocrity.

Machine Learning algorithms can do everything — from sorting cucumbers to curing cancers. We are relying on machines more and more and these technological advancements are inevitable. Best brains on this planet predict that humans will be out of the loop once Artificial Intelligence takes over. Before that happens your career ride will only get worse if you don’t pay attention.

It is predicted that 38% of the US jobs will be automated by 2030, top 7 IT companies in India to layoff at least 56,000 engineers in 2017.

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

It is time to look beyond your resume

Ask Yourself:

• How long will your skills last? — In the open market, not within your organization.
• Do you have skills that can take you to the next level?
• What skills can you learn in the next 6 months to make you market relevant?
• How will you prepare for the job that does not exist yet?

Learn How to Learn

As the author Alvin Toffler once predicted, the future belongs to those who can unlearn and relearn. You need to learn new skills in a short supply of time and keep learning different skills.

Become a voluntary lifelong learner to stay competitive and employable and train others. Learning to learn is a skill you should master and can use it to improve every part of your life.

It is better to know how to learn than to know

Dedicate yourself to trying and learning new ideas, tasks, and skills. You need not know everything all the time, but learning new skills faster and better — that itself is a tough skill to master.

I have none experience in programming languages or data science and learning Machine Learning was difficult but “Learning How to Learn?” trained me on how to master a tough subject?

Mastering Future Relevant Skills

Artificial Intelligence and automation are taking away many jobs; this is irreversible –and once gone those jobs are not coming back.

Before you rush to get any of new skill pay more attention to your psychological well-being, make time for self-awareness. It is better to rewind back; list down your strengths, passions, and skill; then be curious, fair and aggressive on those areas you see overlapping.

Each time you meet a guy who has achieved something and happy with his growth; ask about his skills — and invest in yourself as It’s important to build your knowledge and skills for the future.

Stay up to date on current trends in the technology and in your industry; this will help you foresee new roles and new technology skills.

Share What You Learn

“Work is worship” won’t be a true statement when most of the jobs will be taken over by robots. You need to bring your career up to speed to match current market requirements. Just work won’t be enough.

Access to knowledge is the key to growth and you can use various online platforms to share information with users, providers, and peers. Technology has changed how we share information, instead of borrowing and trading physical assets now scope and scale of information exchange have changed.

“A single fixed identity is a liability today,”, “It only makes people more vulnerable to sudden changes in economic or personal conditions. The most successful and healthy among us now develop multiple identities, managed simultaneously, to be called upon as conditions change.”

Source: Gail Sheehy in New Passages

Don’t Wait, Run a DIY Project for Everything You Learn

You can’t learn to swim without getting in the water. If you have learned Machine Learning or Python — go ahead and ask around your peer and start-up community for any upcoming project. Look around and solve issues.

The best way to learn to code is to code. The best way to prove you can code is to code. University Degree won’t help much. You need to hook up to GitHub and LinkedIn more and have online mentors, reach out to them for their feedback and seek what best they know and can share with you.

I completed Machine Learning course last September, and since then I have been hunting for problems that require an algorithm for their solution. Later I found one at home and created an algorithm that predicts whether your housemaid is coming to work or not. Later I had to drop that project as I stumbled upon an ethical issue

So it’s time to get Raspberry pi zero and teach your kids how to have fun with programming and learn something new yourself and enjoy this brand new perspective.

You Will Enjoy:

How to Setup Artificial Intelligence Center Of Excellence in Your Organization
Learning AI — Formal Education or Online Self-learning — Ph.D. or MOOC
How To Reinvent Your Career By Learning Artificial Intelligence?

How to Future Proof Your Career and Stay Market Relevant in This Automation Age? was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In Sept 2015, I wrote an article about Internet of Things ( IoT ) specific to India and explained why it is an unmissable growth opportunity for India. If I look at what has gone into IoT space in India in the last one year — things are not very promising

IoT Market Size

Analysts have predicted that the installed base for Internet of Things devices will grow from around 10 billion connected devices today to as many as 30 billion devices by 2020 — an uptick of about 3 billion new devices per year

Research firm IDC says, The global Internet of Things market will grow to $1.7 trillion in 2020 from $655.8 billion in 2014

IoT India Market Size

Gartner Says IT Spending in India will Reach $72.4 Billion in 2017 and IoT (Internet of Things) is one of the five new digital platform of five domains: traditional IT systems, customer experience, Internet of Things (IoT), an ecosystem foundation and the intelligence platform that ties all the domains together

Gartner also says that IoT also changes how CIOs will invest in analytics as decisions must move from days to minutes and CIOs should plan to shift their investments in analytics to real-time. Real-time analytics will outpace traditional analytics by a factor of three by 2020 to become 30% of the market.

David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner says

lack of relevant business cases may limit adoption in the shorter term, IoT solution providers must allay these concerns and educate end-user organizations on the benefits of IoT

— and that is the single most important key take away for IoT solution providers

Reliance Group’s IoT service, Juergen Hase also believes India is supposed to become one of the world leaders in IoT in the next 2 to 3 years.

India will account for at least $15b of total revenue forecast, of which electronics hardware will be a major component

Gartner Report “Market Trends: IoT Adoption in India Will Advance at a Slow Pace Through 2020.” has more information

IoT Investments in India

Tyre Express, supported by Microsoft’s BizSpark programme, has raised funds that was facilitated by IvyCamp, an innovation and entrepreneurship platform by IvyCap Ventures.

TempoGO, an IoT and SaaS-based solutions provider for commercial transportation raised Rs 5.6 crore ($825,000) led by Hong Kong-based K2 Investments

Qualcomm Technologies has its focus on growing mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem in India with R&D and localisation support and plans to invest $8.5 million on design initiatives in India

Defence IoT startup CRON Systems Pvt Ltd raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-series A round of investment from early stage investor YourNest India Fund.

Upcoming IoT Events in India

February 8–10, Delhi: Convergence India Expo that will host the 25th edition at Pragati Maidan during February 8–10 will showcase Internet of Things [IoT] and other digital and disruptive technologies

March 2–4, Bengaluru: iotshow.in, A Technical conference for systems integrators of IoT solutions and CXOs who want to implement IoT , and presentations of success stories of IoT implementations for end customers

While there are many new startups in IoT space coming up with new innovative solutions including engineering, logistics and farming .. but the biggest question stands still

Is India Ready To Take IoT To The Next Level?

Where are people, processes and execution? We hear too many slogan about Make in India and Digital India. We see small small investment once or twice every quarter, we hear about smart cities also.

No doubt that there is some aggression — but where is the long-term road map that needs to be followed and worked upon?

Be it at organization level, or country level; this journey is going to be an evolutionary one — but at the same time, very complex.

India IoT (Internet of Things) — Early 2017 Update was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Almost a year back I wrote an article about Internet of Things ( IoT ) specific to India and explained why it is an unmissable growth opportunity for India. If I look at what has gone into IoT space in India in the last one year — things are not very promising.

Last week only, IOT India Congress that just happened in Bangalore, India — aimed to bring the IoT practitioners (hardware — devices, portables, sensors, software, business) and IoT enablers (regulatory, training, investors in IoT, end users) to work together and create a platform that is industry efficient as well as robust

Keynote speaker Sanjay Brahmawar, Global Head of BD at IBM Watson Internet of Things — explained it well along with a few examples

Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad, was giving a video address said that IoT was likely to generate economic benefits of almost $2 trillion to India. “We are sitting on the cusp of a big revolution,” he said

Is India Really Well Positioned For IoT?

Events like these have some value only if they result in some progress. Do we know adoption rates of IoT in India? Is India really positioned to win this race?

How many warehouse owners, product distributors and shipment companies are using IoT to track their fleet, products and services real-time and providing benefits to their consumers

Where are those hospitals in India that use IoT connected medical equipment? A Recentarticle on Entrepreneur India talked about many startups working on asset tracking, wearables, digital signage and traffic monitoring, which are fundamentally app-based models.

CXOtoday recent article also says that IoT would touch all aspects of human life and Internet of Things (IoT) presents big opportunities for Indian Smart Cities. CEOs have talked about visions and opportunities.

There are 13 Indian startups ( not a long list ) that are IoT specific working in all areas like agriculture, automobiles, consumer goods, energy and emergency management systems.

If you want to track progress on India based IoT products and startups Youstory.in is a good place to start with

Some Threats

There are few threats as well. Internet of Things ( IoT ) enables automation in a big way that leads to technological unemployment ( Job loss ). Securing IoT network and devices are another big issues. India has IT advantage because of large IT workforce but IT required to support IoT is different.

Though policy makers like NASSCOM have created IoT frameworks and COE to enable and drive the various initiatives by leveraging, academia, industry, government and Professional connects to democratize innovation in the IoT, but there is hardly any marketplace for enterprise or consumer IoT products or services

Recent Progress and IoT Market In India

Qualcomm is bullish about IoT adoption in India and their goals for India is very clear. Being the largest patent holders in the IoT space, that is a positive statement for IoT progress in India.

They have partnered with Phillips and Cisco for many projects in India and some are for Smart Cities in India. Qualcomm is also mentoring 10 Indian hardware startups for a chance to prototype their innovative tech products and win $100,000 in funding.

India could be seen as a prominent outsourcing destination for the internet of things (IoT) related services

As the global IoT business is expected to touch $300 billion by 2020, India aims to capture 20% market share in another five years, but Will that happen?

Source: LinkedIn Blog , For More Articles Read My LinkedIn Blogs

Is India Well Positioned To Lead The IoT Space? was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is Digital Labor?

You can’t ignore — Technologies like Cloud computing, Internet of Things, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are creating a new kind of labor system; called Digital Labor

With cognitive platforms available now, it is feasible for the machine to learn and understand the meaning of what’s going around. Every industry is disrupted by these emerging technologies, and more and more companies are experimenting with cognitive computing and automation platforms

There is no doubt that this is another industrial revolution. Many tasks we perform today will be taken up by Digital Labor.

How Machine Learning Can Transform IT Services?

Machine Learning can significantly transform IT services, but have some objectives before you hit the road -as Machine Learning is not some magic you apply and get benefits out of it.

• Collect, analyze and predict information across the network, and use information to predict IT lag.
• Reduce SLA violations by assigning tickets to SMEs who have handled similar tickets
• Contextualize multiple issues and make most relevant operation staff see a list root causes and impacts and auto-initiate a virtual war room
• Use ticket text classification to create a model and use sample to further train the model
• Predict IT service delivery cost by predicting volume change and activities efforts
• Balance resources, work flexibility and IT service performance
• Knowledge article can be saved automatically
• Make IT team to focus on workflow rather than individual alerts
• Automated analysis of security data, understanding user behavior, giving them risk score and step-up their authentication based on sudden change in their behavior

Gartner says,

It’s time to take advantage of these technologies at the IT service desk to support the proactive, personal and dynamic needs of the digital workplace.

How Machine Learning Complements Your Current IT Tools?

Machine learning techniques can complement your current monitoring tools, providing root-cause analysis and real-time detection of any anomaly.

The volume of IT telemetry (events, alerts, traps, messages) can be huge and overwhelming. With the assistance of machine learning, however, your IT production operations staff can make immediate sense of the potentially thousands of events generated across the environment. The ability to quickly see the signal from the noise, as well as to understand how the events are all related to a couple of situations, is known as IT situational awareness — something that all IT teams are looking to improve upon. Source

Example 1:

Service Desk tools like Zendesk, Desk.com uses machine learning and semantic analysis to automatically tag incoming tickets so that you can deal with similar tickets in badges

Zendesk is one of the first customer service platforms implementing machine learning to natively auto-respond to customer tickets with relevant knowledge base articles, helping solve and deflect customer inquiries before they ever reach an agent.

Example 2:

Atlassian introduced smart graph to their JIRA Service Desk, a hybrid algorithm that combines keyword search and machine learning to provide better search results.

Smart graph does away with playing the guessing game. By optimizing real interactions and machine learning to translate between IT forms and common lingo — your customers are happy campers

But, Don’t Forget These:

Performance of such tools varies based on the machine learning algorithms used, ranking methods, quality of datasets and training models

Have some goals before you implement Machine Learning tools in your IT operations.

Similar Blogs :

Automation: A threat to India’s IT Service Model

Robots Are Not The Problem, You Are

Work is Worship Won’t Be True For Us -So Let Robots Be Purified

How Machine Learning Can Transform IT Services? was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Vineet Nayyar, former CEO of HCL Technologies once said

Let’s not forget, the IT industry in India was built on the back of cheap labour

India has largely capitalized on its large pool of English speaking IT engineering graduates to attract enough outsourcing work from US, Europe, and other geographies, but now this traditional IT Service Model is under serious threat and all this is going to change sooner than you can think of.

and now, Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Stanford University, says

India’s “IT miracle” as we know it. It is dead; It is over.

The future of IT Services Model has a lot of automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and these technologies will be used excessively to improve customer’s business efficiencies and will replace humans for much of what we do now.

What Is Changing?

Have a look at some of these recent news articles and you will realize the impact of automation on (un)employment

• In fiscal 2015–16, Infosys released nearly 4,000 full-time employees from projects as a result of automation of underlying services.
• Another report says that automation reduces hiring of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Cognizant by 24%.
• IT sector to lose 6.4 lakh “low-skilled” jobs to automation by 2021
• Wipro to reduce headcount by 30% in next 3 years with investments in automation, artificial intelligence, and digital technology
• Wipro’s AI Platform Holmes Will Replace 3300 Engineers’ Jobs!

What Can You Do?

High margins are still possible, but not by linearly increasing head-count. If it can be done by a machine there is no point getting it done by fresh engineering graduate. Look for the futuristic wave of opportunities rather than protecting underperforming legacy models.

You are replacing your jobs with algorithms. Why would anyone settle for a human worker when faster and efficient 24*7*365 working algorithms can be implemented?

According to NASSCOM, The big implications for companies are:

• The need to develop new service lines. New service lines will account for 40% of all revenues by 2025
• Shifting portfolios to advanced, disruptive technologies
• Managing customer digitization at different speeds. Companies will need to cater to customers who are Digital leaders, Smart followers as well as the Digital laggards
• Re-skilling of people as revenues decouple from headcount
• Forging new capabilities through M&A, partnerships, incubators, and open innovation

What Can (Will) Go Wrong?

Companies, so far were labor biased will become capital-biased and that will take wealth away from the labor; that means more and money will be spent on automation and technologies and less on the human workforce. So with larger margins due to new technologies, owner of the technologies will grow richer while available human labor has to compete with robots/automation for the lowest wages as long as it can.

So with increasing use of technology and decreasing use of human workforce, wealth will move towards the owners of those technologies.

Most of the workforce feel that they are over-educated for their current occupations and under-skilled for the future technologies, and with diminishing returns on education, this problem will only grow more acutely.

Over To You Now

Robots are not the problem, humans are, because we are pathologically addicted to ‘old style’ of work and our psychological worth is tied to our titles. The fact is that “Work is Worship” is no longer true.

We need to be an entrepreneur within the organization and create “labour-absorbing” technologies as opposed to “capital-intensive” technologies so that the surplus population can be employed.

The real story of the future is not going to be a clash between technology and unemployment impact, but will definitely become even more difficult to address for our policy makers and associations like NASSCOM.

India’s Dying Cheap Labor Based IT Service Model, How About New Digital Labor Model? was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been few years we are seeing a lot of media interest in Industry 4.0 that is the fourth revolution in the field of manufacturing.

If we look at the regional interest there are only two countries Germany and Japan.

Well, it makes perfect sense, but you could ask where is China?

Also, Were we expecting India? No, I guess.

India’s Opportunity:

“Digital India” and “Make In India” is already motivating enterprises and industrialists for smart city initiatives, but there is no traction on the ground except some media is talking about it.

India has this unique opportunity to lead the road to Smart Manufacturing considering the fact that India has a long history of manufacturing and has a large technology orientated talent pool that can be leveraged to make India “The Digital Factory Of The World”

Indian IoT industry is expected to be worth US$ 15 billion and to connect 28 billion devices to the internet by 2020. Additionally, Government of India is planning to develop five incubation centers for ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) start-ups, as a part of Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi’s Digital India and Startup India campaign, with at least two centers to be set up in rural areas to develop solutions for smart agriculture.

Photo credit: Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com

Industry 4.0 Could Be India’s Biggest Manufacturing Innovation Opportunity was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Blockchain has been around and gaining momentum around the world, but in India, it is only known to the technology people and industry that is going to benefit out of this technology isn’t talking much about Blockchain in India.

Infosys’ EdgeVerve System is already in the initial talks to discuss with the banks to use Blockchain technology.

Are we expecting that a land transaction will be done in hours instead of days or weeks; only time will come, but Blockchain will save a lot of money for the banks and bring higher efficiencies in the system and eventually end customers will benefits.

Currently, in India, there is no law to buy or sell Bitcoin. Indian industry leaders, policy makers, regulators and experts have been meeting over this agenda; but nothing came up as of now.

ZebPay has an application platform for Bitcoin, and Goenka of ZebPay says “This is the internet of money. China does Rs 10,000–20,000 crore worth of bitcoin trade a day. There’s no reason why we (India) should be different,” I am not sure about the user base for this app and how many transactions have been in place.

Cognizant, Wipro, TCS and Infosys all are now working on FinTech and considering Blockchain technology.

In India, the laws are yet to catch up on how to deal with this technology disruption; but the popularity of Bitcoin and Blockchain has certainly increased.

Where to go next? ( for more details on Blockchain)

• Deloitte : Blockchain: Enigma,Paradox, and Opportunity : PDF download link
• Accenture: Blockchain in the Investment Bank PDF download link
• EY : Blockchain technology as a platform for digitization Implications for the insurance industry : PDF download link
• Gov.uk: Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain — Gov.uk: PDF download link
• Barclays : Blockchain: understanding the potential — Barclays : PDF download link
• PwC : What’s next for blockchain in 2016? — PwC : PDF download link
• Sogeti: Blockchain: cryptoplatform for a frictionless economy: PDF download link

Now, what do you think of this statement/prediction given by Blockchain Co-Founder, Nicolas Cary

You Can Be Your Own Bank

Source: You Can be Your Own Bank — with Blockchain

Blockchain For India? Yes or No, Yes But When? was originally published in Emerging Technologies India on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.