AI is going to get cheaper and applicable across domains: Sriram Raghavan, Vice President at IBM Research

Sriram Raghavan, Vice President at IBM Research said AI is going to get cheaper and broadly applicable across domains.

“The current era of generative AI is exciting because of the ability to build and rapidly adopt which we never had in previous generations of AI,” he said in a conversation on Saturday with R. Anand, Director, Chennai International Centre (CIC) on the topic, demystifying the AI revolution.

“The amount of progress in making AI cheaper is enormous. You should assume that whatever task you are doing will get cheaper every six months for the next five plus years,” Mr. Raghavan said.

“There is almost no domain where you should assume that AI is not eventually not going to make an impact. The rate and pace might vary across sectors,” he said.

For enterprises looking to adopt AI, Mr. Raghavan advised them to pick a domain in which they would have a huge multiplicative factor.

Picking one domain and going deep versus spreading yourself thin in various domains has been the distinguishing factor between companies that have started to make use of AI and those who are doing 100 of pilots, he said. 

Enterprises should think AI as a transformation project and should reimagine work and there should be top down commitment, Mr. Raghavan said.

He also said that enterprises should not sit back and wait, but jump into the AI game, and at the same time play the long-term one. 

Data would be the key differentiator for enterprises, Mr. Raghavan said. 

He said domains in which there was maturity of data would adopt AI much faster, while it would be much slower in safety critical areas.

Mr. Raghavan said he was dismissive of the narrative that AI was super intelligent and would take over the world.

He said the key risks which needed to be addressed were misinformation, deep fakes and cyber security threats which regulations should address.

Mr. Raghavan said like any technology AI also would have an impact on jobs.

“The reason why it feels different is earlier technologies automated physical aspects of human beings, but AI is trying to substitute cognitive aspects. Also since it is digital the adoption would be faster, so reskilling would become a challenge,” he said.