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“Responsible AI or AI Ethics is The Need of The Hour”

NDM News Network

Today, technology adoption with the right approach helps businesses to boost their growth and touch new heights in the hyper competitive market. Digital Transformation is way ahead which businesses need to understand and plan accordingly. In the race to become market leader, businesses across all sectors are integrating latest technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into their IT infrastructure. In India, the digital transformation wave is going good and has contributed a lot in the growth of overall economy. Integrating these technologies can enable businesses to overcome the challenges, make better decisions and grow faster. In line with understanding the whole scenario and growing adoption of AI, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal spoke to Preetpal Singh, Senior Vice President - Intelligent Automation, Persistent Systems. Mr. Preetpal talked about the role of AI, tech adoption, their solutions and much more. Read below the excerpts:

Rajeev: How do you see the role of AI for any business establishment in India who are taking digital transformation journey?

Preetpal: Today, I can confidently say that digital transformation has truly transitioned from being a buzz word to real implementation. Enterprises, in India and globally, are investing heavily in transforming the way work is done, leveraging technology across functions and tapping data like never before. If these are crucial steps in a digital transformation journey, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the big leap. It is hard to imagine transforming an enterprise at scale without cognition. The primary reasons for embracing digital transformation are to achieve scalable efficiency and personalized experience, both of which are accelerated using AI.

In fact, I would consider cognitive technologies like AI to be one of the key elements behind the success of a digital transformation journey.

Rajeev: How low-code machine learning can empower responsible AI?

Preetpal: I think low-code, no-code, or intelligent automation-based machine learning models are already a game-changer as they allow anybody to develop AI solutions quickly and accurately. Now, you may wonder how this is a game-changer. No-code or low-code AI can ensure pre-existing capabilities, thereby reducing the dependency on development skills, because of which anybody, with or without coding skills, can develop AI solutions and help organizations achieve faster ROI.

Responsible AI or AI Ethics is the need of the hour as we come across many examples of loopholes or misuse. Ensuring the development of responsible AI is an ethical issue where the AI solutions should ensure reproducibility, transparency, accountability, privacy, and security. At Persistent, we have built an MLOps Framework to ensure our commitment to responsible AI. The framework is designed to unify ML system development, deployment, and monitoring to allow continuous delivery of high-performing models. Along with performance consideration, integrating data fairness checks and model interpretation in the framework makes the AI system responsible.

Rajeev: What are the challenges of in creating responsible AI and crucial role of machine learning, artificial intelligence?

Preetpal: I think one of the biggest challenges in AI development is the lack of transparency that leads to a trust deficit. The reason for this trust deficit is quite simple to understand — how many of us have access to or understanding of the AI models that are doing the magic that we experience as consumers? It is absolutely our responsibility as developers of the solutions to maintain secrecy to counter threats. However, this naturally leads consumers to believe that AI solutions are biased and less trustworthy.  

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are at the core of all the next-gen features that we experience. I believe developers and companies now have access to toolkits and frameworks that can ensure AI algorithms are fair and transparent. IBM, Facebook, and Google have released AI toolkits named AI Fairness 360, Fairness Flow, and What-If Tool, respectively.

Rajeev: What are the latest technology adoption trends among key verticals of Indian market when it comes to give best customer experience (CX)?

Preetpal: Customer experience (CX) is about understanding consumers to offer personalized solutions, but effective personalization comes by embracing technologies to their full potential. In India’s context, we are seeing accelerated tech-adoption across verticals. There is increase in the adoption of deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, conversational AI, and intelligent automation technologies.

To that end, the financial and healthcare verticals are adopting intelligent automation the most—they are truly transforming experiences by automating their workflows. The results are out for all of us to see – the change is huge but not drastic yet, and that leaves us with a lot of scope towards delivering an outstanding customer experience.

One quick example of improving CX with technology is seen in the way chatbots have penetrated the Indian market. With chatbots, companies across banking, hyper-local delivery start-ups, and many other consumer-facing verticals have seen remarkable success.

Rajeev: How do you sell your solutions in India? Please brief about your channel network model

Preetpal: In India, we typically leverage multiple channels to promote the impact our solutions can create.

  1. Partner’s Application Market Portal - We publish our vertical-specific solutions such as Know Your Customer (eKYC), Loan Origination System (LOS), Policy Administration, Claims Management, Revenue Cycle Optimization (RCO), Digital Front Door (DFD), CasaX (Real Estate Management) and horizontal solutions such as HR Onboarding, Vendor Management, Dynamic Case Management, Customer 360 and many more. Customers look up these solutions and request for demonstrations, which then initiates the sales process for us.
  2. Partner Sales Channel – We leverage our partner sales channel to sell our solutions to their existing or prospective customer. With Persistent developed and readily available solution accelerators, we reduce the sales cycle for our partner sales team.
  3. Webinars and Roundtables – Our inside sales and marketing team, along with the platform partner marketing team, executes a customer reach-out program via webinars and roundtables, helping us promote the solutions and initiate the sales cycle.
  4. Social Media – Our marketing team helps us in the creation of key solutions artifacts such as whitepapers, demo videos, etc. and promotes them through social media channels to increase customer reach.
  5. Customized Promotion – Our marketing team, along with the client partner, runs client-specific targeted campaigns to promote best-fit solutions. This helps us boost the customer loyalty and deliver a better ROI for our customers.