AI experts emphasise human expertise and ethical considerations at The Hindu AI Summit 2024

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in transforming industries and improving efficiency, there are areas where human intervention remains essential — this was the perspective shared by panellists at a session titled ‘Transition from Hope to Reality: Navigating AI Challenges’ during The Hindu AI Summit 2024.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in transforming industries and improving efficiency, there are areas where human intervention remains essential — this was the perspective shared by panellists at a session titled ‘Transition from Hope to Reality: Navigating AI Challenges’ during The Hindu AI Summit 2024.

“No one expected that GenAI would creep into all fields. Today, it has taken centre stage in the education sector and cine industry,” Manjunath Prasad, Head, IT Operations, TVS Mobility, said. “There is a general conception is that GenAI can do everything — it cannot do everything. Giving the right input and the right data matters,” he added. Mr. Prasad also pointed out that human skill is needed to review whether we are on the right track.

The panel, which was moderated by Suresh Vijayaraghavan, Chief technology Officer of The Hindu Group, also talked about specialists required to handle operations and manage AI. “GenAI is not just a simple program, it comes with various things. You should keep in mind the entire stack; you need to consider the data, the security, and what gateway you are going to use,” said Srinivasan A.N., VP-Information Technology, SRF Limited.

“You need a domain specialist, a data scientist to manage the data, a software guy to integrate AI with the system. For a successful AI project, you need to have an ethical AI hacker also in your team,” he added.

Roopesh Kumar, Head, Data Centre Projects, Sify Infinit Spaces Ltd, pointed out how digitisation is often confused with AI. “The resource required for digitisation is far lower than AI,” he said. Commenting on how AI is being used at data centres, Mr. Kumar said it is difficult for humans to look at a vast set of data, and that is where AI comes in. “It provides inputs to our teams,” he added.

Annie Uthra, Head, Department of Computational Intelligence at SRMIST, said: “GenAI technologies are growing fast, and to cope with those changes, we have been up-skilling our students as well as our faculty. The institution offers professional electives that can be introduced at any time, and these are handled by industry experts... and value-added courses, which are conducted for 15-30 hours.”

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.