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 views 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 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, you know, 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 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. is 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 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 and 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 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 solves global problems in the right context. 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 is needed for every enterprise, and create those solutions. And that's where 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 quickly is 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. 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 had 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. 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, and 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 workforce. Most of the CIOs say so much of backlog they have not handled or caught up so far, they would probably try to use the buffer available to catch up 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 do the tech modernization, they have to get the workflows right. There's so much work to be done. And the third area is that they have to get the models right. Somebody has to build their models, train the models, orchestrate the model, build the agents. And the fourth is the most important, we call 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 aggregator development. There's so much happening and there's no need to panic. You have to 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 their pie.
Well, there is no need to panic. That's the word from 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. I want to understand the rationale for that. And is this going to now mean a pivot for TCS from software also to infrastructure? Or you've also got the TPG data set. 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. The minister eloquently put together the four layers. The more layers you participate, the more revenue and more value you can add to your customers. So we are looking at participating right from the infrastructure layer. There's an infrastructure layer, a model layer, an application layer, then there's the 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's 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 the sector, how we are looking at capex and...
So more acquisitions likely. That is certainly the takeaway. 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, it 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 is? 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, 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 is going to be added in the coming six 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 from whichever geography those labs come from. Our sovereign models have really turned out to be very good.
Well, you know, sir, speaking of use cases now, and I think that's where the question is. All of this technology is great, but what are we actually going to use it for? Specifically from a government standpoint, from a citizens perspective, what can we? When we talk about UPI, we've seen the benefits accrue to citizens. When we talk about AI, what do you see as being the next wave forward from a citizens perspective?
So as part of the AI mission, we are creating practically a UPI kind of structure for AI, a UPI of AI. And what we are doing there is we are creating a platform or an orchestration layer where multiple models can provide the framework out of which new solutions can be created, just like the UPI platform provided the opportunity to startups to create the solutions. A similar structure we are creating. Multiple models can be used for creating solutions. We see huge potential in healthcare. We have seen how the western world basically has very high cost healthcare models. Some countries have even more than 10% of GDP going into healthcare. Can we create a quality healthcare which is accessible? So that's the objective with which we have approached this topic, and lots of innovative solutions are coming up. Many of them have been displayed in the exhibition here. Then education is another very big focus. Can we have personalized education tools? In a sense, AI tutors specifically for a particular student's needs. That is another thing. Agriculture is a big, big area in which AI will make a very big difference. MSMEs is going to be a big focus as part of the AI mission in the next version of it. We will be launching solutions which can then be adopted free of cost by a large number of MSMEs and other citizens, all citizens, which can then be used to improve their lives.
Speaking of the AI movement so to speak, one of the critical aspects is going to be the data center buildout, and TCS is playing a role there with TPG. Give us a status check on where things currently stand as well as the road ahead on being able to achieve the kind of targets that you've set out.
