India has the highest penetration of artificial intelligence skills among the workforce. AI is the fastest growing skills set and increasing exponentially, said Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, while addressing an event at the company’s R&D centre in Bengaluru.

He also said that today the GDP component impacted by digital technologies in India is 8 percent which will increase to 60 percent by 2021.

This confidence is powered by India’s adoption of AI solutions to create breakthrough innovations and accelerate the digital transformation of the country.

According to Microsoft, over 700 business and government organizations have adopted its Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. Over 60 percent of these AI customers come from large businesses in manufacturing, financial services.

There is no denying that the Indian consumer is one the biggest beneficiaries of recent advances in AI. When a customer at Future Generali uses the AI chatbot REVA to either get policy status, or premium due date, or make renewal payments, it signals that Indian consumers are readily engaged with the proliferation of AI.

According to Gartner, 25 percent of all customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than 2 percent in 2017.

Maheshwari in his address also said that the use cases of AI is growing in India and that will be a game changer for the country.

Talview, an AI enabled talent assessment technology provider, saved an upward of 9,000 hours of time of a customer in identifying, sourcing and screening talent. And it does this by using its automated video interviewing solution which helps customers hire from the untapped talent pool from multiple cities across the country.

Apart from engaging with customers and optimizing operations, AI is also making healthcare more accessible and affordable. But how? One example of this is Narayana Health which has implemented real-time data analytics and predictive insights across their operations running on Microsoft Azure, SQL Server and Power BI.

With the help of AI solutions, the hospital chain can predict better cost of surgeries, reduce the time spent by patients in the ICU or monitor consumables and antibiotic use.

In 2018, Microsoft partnered with Apollo Hospitals to use AI for early detection of cardiac diseases. SRL Diagnostics is applying Ai for more accurate diagnosis in digital pathology and early detection of diseases such as cancer.

NITI Aayog is working with Microsoft and Forus Health to roll out a technology for early detection of diabetic retinopathy as a pilot project.

In the report National strategy for artificial intelligence, Niti Aayog said that 3Nethra, developed by Forus Health, can screen for common eye problem. It is a is a portable device.

Integrating AI capabilities to this device using Microsoft’s retinal imaging APIs enables operators of 3Nethra device to get AI-powered insights even when they are working at eye checkup camps in remote areas with nil or intermittent connectivity to the cloud, the report further said.

The resultant technology solution also solves for quality issues with image capture and systems checks in place to evaluate the usability of the image captured.

Microsoft will also provide farm advisory services to Niti Aayog which will help increase crop yield, pest detection and pest incident predictions as part of projects across locations identified by NITI Aayog.

Adoption of AI for healthcare applications is expected to see an exponential increase in next few years, said Niti Aayog in its discussion paper on National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.

Accenture, in one of its its recent AI research reports, had estimated that AI will boost India’s annual growth rate by 1.3 percentage points by 2035.