Shireen is in conversation with the IT minister and the TCS MD and CEO. Let's listen into that.
Hello and welcome to CNBC TV18 special broadcast here live from the India AI Impact Summit. I'm Shireen Bhan. We're broadcasting from our studios. As you've been noticing, we've been live streaming here for the last several days. It is my pleasure to welcome to our studios here the minister himself Ashwini Vaishnaw. Also with us K. Krithivasan, the CEO of TCS. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us. Mr. Vaishnaw, let me start by talking to you about the milestone that's just been clocked. A record has been created in the Guinness Book of World Records. Please tell our viewers about that.
Our prime minister inspired us to involve the students in responsible use of AI. So that's why we reached out to the colleges and spoke with the faculty members as well as the students and they all came out in large numbers to take a pledge on responsible and ethical use of AI. Guinness was expecting a number of 5,000 for a record. We finally came out with 250,000, 2.5 lakh students taking pledge, and just now Guinness gave us the world record certificate for the largest number of people taking pledge to use AI responsibly and ethically.
Well, the certificate is on its way and we should hopefully be able to show it to you by the end of this conversation. But Mr. Vaishnaw, speaking about the ethical use of AI and while this milestone is a significant one, the government has also brought in regulations including more recently the labeling norms for AI for synthetic content. I want to start with that sir, that's the first step. How far do you believe the government needs to move on regulation to try and address this issue?
This is very important because when people look at a video, should they trust that video or should they not trust that video? Is that a real video or is that a fake content? That choice in people's minds has to be clearly an informed choice. That's why it's very important that any video which is generated using AI and it's a deep fake in that case that label should be there so that people can make the choice whether they want to believe it or not.
Well, moving away from AI and labeling norms and regulation, let's talk about the big theme here, one of the big themes here at the India AI Impact Summit and that is building out AI infrastructure and I'll get K. Krithivasan to come in on that as well. I know that you've firmly believed that the amount that's been committed to India by the likes of Google etc., that's only the tip of the iceberg, you expect much more to follow. On the back of the conversations that have happened here, sir, you know the number you gave me in Davos was about 90 billion. What does it look like for the road ahead?
Over the coming two years, we can expect about $200 billion investment in the AI infra layer and simultaneously we can expect more than $17 billion in VC funding for the startups and deep tech, especially deep tech startups in solutions in applications in the way AI would be used.
The Qualcomm CEO and they've just committed $150 million as part of a venture fund to invest in India-led AI startups. The question though is will India be one of the fastest growing AI nations from a consumer point of view or is it also going to be a developers nation from an AI standpoint?
I think India will be a developers nation in the sense that we have today a very large IT industry which understands the enterprises very well. We have seen how our IT industry basically solve global problems in the Y2K situation. This one is a much bigger opportunity in my opinion where all the global enterprises would be looking up to industry partners who can come into the enterprise, understand the enterprise, look at the potential applications of AI based solutions and have that trust which basically is needed for every enterprise and create those solutions and that's where our IT industry stands very strong.
Well you believe the Indian IT industry stands very strongly, so let's get the picture from the Indian IT services sector itself. Your ambition, K. Krithivasan, of making TCS the largest AI tech services provider in the world. And in that context I want to address the issue that was raised by the minister. You know many believe that this is going to be a crisis for India's IT services sector but the minister says it's going to be an opportunity. We've seen what has happened through the month of February, it's been a pretty brutal correction that we've seen from a market point of view. But do you believe that this is an opportunity for Indian IT to capitalize on and not so much of a risk as it is being made out?
Absolutely, I agree with the minister. We believe sometimes the bigger the disruption, the bigger the opportunity for us. And so there is some amount of fear mongering, some amount of lack of understanding. But if you unpeel what happens, there are three broad layers in which AI is impacting the IT industry. One is what we traditionally do. The second is what industries or enterprises have to do to enable themselves to leverage, adopt, or accelerate their AI adoption. Third is what they can do more with AI. If you look at all these three, the first one what we traditionally do, there is some productivity being brought in, like it can vary from 20% to 30%. But even there, if you talk to the CIOs, they would tell you that this productivity they're not going to reduce the headcount. Most of the CIOs would say there's so much of backlog they have not handled or catered so far. They would probably try to use the buffer available to cater to the backlog. So even in what we traditionally do, we don't expect a reduction in demand. Then for the enterprises to use AI, they have to get the data estate right. They have to reduce the tech modernization. They have to get the workflows right. There's so much of work to be done. And the third area is that they have to get the models right. We have somebody has to build their models, train the models, orchestrate the model, build the agents. And the fourth is the most important: with all that, what new they are going to do. For instance, some of our clients we are doing drug discovery using AI or claims process automation using AI or software development. There's so much happening and there's no need to panic. You have to think, sit back, relax and think properly. There's so much more work to be done. Every time there's a disruption, the work expands and the good companies will participate, take a forward-leaning approach, invest in that and they should be able to increase the pie.
Well, there is no need to panic. That's the word from K. Krithivasan of TCS. But I also want to talk about what we are seeing Indian IT services companies like yours do, forge new partnerships. You've just announced a partnership 24 hours ago with AMD to bring the Helios rack to India. And I want to understand from you the rationale for that and is this going to now mean a pivot for TCS from software also to infrastructure? You've also got the TPG data center.
So it's again based on a larger scheme. We believe that you will be able to participate more in the AI ecosystem if you operate across multiple layers. As the minister eloquently put together you were there in Davos, the four layers. The more layers you participate, the more revenue, more value you can add to your customers. So we are looking at participating right from the infrastructure layer. There's an infrastructure layer, there's a model layer, there's application layer, then there's an intelligence layer. We want to increase our participation in each one of those layers. That's why you see us participating with TPG, then signing up with AMD, we also signed up with some of the design companies. So that's the overall plan.
And in this pivot to infrastructure, how do you see this changing the complexion of TCS going forward?
It is definitely a pivotal moment for us also. We are not only investing in infrastructure, we are also getting more acquisitive because this is the area where we have to acquire capability and competency at speed and scale. So we are looking to be more acquisitive as well. So this is fundamentally going to change the way we approach infrastructure, how we are looking at capex.
So more acquisitions likely, that is certainly the call. Mr. Vaishnaw, I want to also address the issue of sovereignty and I think that is being linked very closely to what many countries are doing including India. We of course have a frontier model being launched with the support of the government. Sarvam is on course with that. But as you see more and more of this becoming critical to a country's security, to a country's economic security as well, what do you believe the way forward will be? What will our national priorities be?
Sovereignty has multiple dimensions. One of the dimensions is models. Another one is having the infra within the country and third is having the legal framework. On the legal framework we have a very balanced legal framework as a part of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. And on the infra which has to be in India so that we cannot be switched off. So that is right now building up very rapidly as part of our common compute, which is one of the major initiatives under the AI mission. We already have 38,000 GPUs. Another 20,000 GPUs are going to be added in the coming 6 months and that will substantially increase over the coming months. So that's the second part. And of course the models have come out very well. On so many parameters they are better than the frontier models coming from big labs, whether they are from whichever geography those labs come from. Our sovereign bouquet of models has really turned out to be very good.
