India needs ‘UPI of AI’ to move from users to creators: Manish Gupta of Dell Technologies

Manish Gupta, Managing Director of Dell Technologies India, said India needs to build a “UPI of AI” if it wants to create value at scale and remain globally competitive.

“We had the UPI of money, we need to have UPI of AI, where we are building that at scale using the data sources that we have, we have the largest ones. And some of the initiatives that the government has taken, India AI Mission, but equally think about AI Kosh, there are more than 7,000 data sets that are now available to organisations of all sizes, use that to ensure that we are developing for the country at the population scale through academia, through private sector, through startups, through MSMEs, all coming together,” he said at the India AI Impact Summit.

“And that really requires a consistent API layer that’s bringing, theoretically, maybe even all of the data centre and the compute capacity that we are creating as a part of AI Mission to be one single layer that can be consumed by anybody and everybody across the nation to start to innovate on that to start to develop on that,” he added.

Gupta said India has already demonstrated its strength in adopting technology at scale but must now focus on building creators. “We’ve really got to think away from the users to the developers, you know, it’s got to move from one billion users to one million or 10 million developers,” he said.

On the debate around innovation versus regulation, he said the two cannot be treated as competing priorities. “I honestly don’t think that these are opposing forces. Agility versus security, and, you know, particularly in this side of technology, you cannot have them act as opposing.”

He pointed to existing policy structures as a starting point. “I think the government has done a phenomenal job in building some of the frameworks around that, you know, and the institutions, AISI as one example, but on the privacy side, DPDP or DEPA, all of those acts being there, are good frameworks to start with.”

Addressing enterprise hesitation around AI adoption, Gupta said the challenge is not primarily about security. “I don’t think it’s necessarily about security. You know, it’s really about saying how many of those have real use cases? While the real use cases exist, how many of them are able to monetise or are able to see them scale from experimentation or pilots into production?”

“And I think that’s a job that we as industry folks who understand the technology, who are innovating in this space, really need to bring to the table so that we can bring this to the fore across the nation and enterprises and organisations of all sizes and academia and public.”

On trust, he said explainability will be critical for wider acceptance. “That trust comes really inherently once you have got explainability and people are aware on what outcomes are coming.”