The Hindu AI Summit 2024: ‘AI will drive innovation, revolutionise business’

During a panel discussion on ‘Driving Innovation: AI’s Role in Transforming Business Operation’, Hariharan Veeramuthu, Chief Information Officer, Gulf Asia Engineering Projects, spoke about how businesses can strategically integrate AI to enhance operational efficiency

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will drive innovation and also bring innovative thinking to life more effectively and efficiently, and in the realm of business, it is going to revolutionise and deliver 100% results, said panellists at the The Hindu AI Summit 2024 in Chennai on Thursday (November 21, 2024).

During a panel discussion on ‘Driving Innovation: AI’s Role in Transforming Business Operation’, moderated by L.V. Navaneeth, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), The Hindu Group, Hariharan Veeramuthu, Chief Information Officer, Gulf Asia Engineering Projects, spoke about how businesses can strategically integrate AI to enhance operational efficiency and drive innovation across functions.

“There are three pillars: people, process, and technology. Now there are many IT tools and systems that are being implemented by different industries and companies. We need to look at the core areas where we have bottlenecks in the process, where we need to fine-tune our existing systems, and the need to migrate from the legacy to the digital journey,” he added.

Speaking about how AI can contribute to achieving sustainability goals in business operations, such as reducing waste and optimising energy usage, he said a lot of products have come up with AI as the base. “We need to have particular metrics to optimise our solutions. Those can be applied to day-to-day activities and improvise the process by using technology to leverage their efficiency in operations,” he added.

Nitin Maheshwari, Director, Information Technology, Flex, while speaking about how AI is enabling companies to rethink traditional business models for greater confidence, said when legacy companies want to become digital first, they should not just attempt to replace certain technologies with the latest technologies.

There are certain questions that need to be asked as to why the company wants to become digital first and need to be creative and how much is the investment required for the technological advancement. All these should be implemented iteratively with start small, try it, and then build upon it, he said.

Speaking about the likely impact of AI on jobs and the future of employability in the workplace, he said from an employee perspective, we need to get back to reality and embrace AI, and from the organisation perspective, AI is not only a driver to save cost; it can also help in terms of making employees and partners more efficient. “Going forward, AI will do whatever it does best, right from processing and playing with massive amounts of data to solving complex problems. Human intelligence and artificial intelligence will coexist, and they will complement each other,” he added.

Sadique Ahmed, Founder and CEO, Pathfinder Global, while speaking about the key performance indicators (KPIs) that organisations should use to measure the success of AI initiatives in business operations, said optimisation of business, financial metrics, customer engagement and satisfaction, sustainability, and increasing productivity of the people are some of the key metrics. “How are these tools going to enable our leadership and our teams on the ground to deliver more? Instead of having an army of people, how can we get better outcomes from the same people is an important metric.”

He said AI is going to make life much better and that it is here to stay. “We need to embrace the new revolution,” he said. With examples, he elaborated on the higher cost of customer services at the level of hyper-personalisation, and said: “With AI, it is just a fraction of the cost on scale to look at it… People were scared it was going to take jobs. But actually, it gave more jobs. AI is going to increase opportunities. It is going to push mankind to be creative and have critical thinking.”

Raghu Achat, Vice President, Information Technology, Thejo Engineering, while speaking about implementing AI in legacy systems and traditional business practices, observed that there is nothing called legacy systems anymore. “Because today, systems are capable of crunching structured and unstructured data,” he said. He also stressed the need to break the legacy mindset to adopt technologies, and said that motivation should be the prime driver behind digital transformation in an organisation.

The event is presented by the SRM Institute of Science & Technology (SRMIST) and powered by Sify, in association with ManageEngine. The Confederation of Indian Industry is the industry partner and CIO Association is the strategic partner. RetailGPT is the phygital commerce partner for the summit, Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project the healthcare partner, and LatentView Analytics the data analytics partner. Tamil Nadu Technology Hub (iTNT) has been roped in as the digital transformation partner, while Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation has come in as the skilling partner. Chennai Metro Rail is the mobility partner, and the TV partner is Puthiya Thalaimurai.

Published - November 21, 2024 06:34 pm IST