Artificial Intelligence will not replace us, but make us smarter: Sandip Patel, IBM

“Technology is shaping our lives and businesses in a fundamental way,” said Sandip Patel, MD, IBM at the exchange4media’s TechManch conference in Mumbai on Wednesday.

Dependency on technology, ever since the pandemic, has accelerated tremendously and the business world has jumped on the bandwagon to achieve maximum ROI. Patel, in his session, touched upon how businesses can make the most of the tools present around them and how he believes cloud, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and quantum technology are going to be the gamechangers.

Speaking about the importance of hybrid cloud in a post-pandemic world, Patel said, “Hybrid cloud is a very critical movement that's happening because it all gets down to the large volumes of data that are now available, the kind of computational power that's required to drive better decisions to drive more automation and so on. And so, infrastructures will need to be decided on whether you have a large machine that actually does a lot of the drudgery assistance for you, or you have it as a cloud which is more of a shared infrastructure. And that is a very technical discussion that we have with a lot of companies, but I, we have a fundamental view, that things are moving to a hybrid world so people will have clouds people will have on prem systems, you will have all kinds of different infrastructure.”

Patel also explained why artificial intelligence is a phenomenon that it is today and how data makes AI and vice-versa. “Today's technology enables us to capture that data and make sense of it. And there is a lot of that data, which needs to come together to enable us to make smarter business decisions. So artificial intelligence clearly, is not relevant at all without large volumes of data. That's what makes it relevant. That's what makes it useful and valuable to businesses. So, I like to think about artificial intelligence as more of augmented intelligence. It's not going to replace, it's not going to change the creative aspects of what we do in our businesses, of using judgment calls in terms of how we think about new product design or new campaigns, etc. But it does make us a lot smarter,” he shared.

Towards, the end of the session, Patel explained the importance of technology, data and AI in the world of business and their growth. “We are living in a world where there's going to be more and more data that's going to be available to us. A lot of that data, you’re not going to be able to store it. You need to use it instantaneously. But if you can use the power of technologies like AI to bring a lot of those datasets together and make it relevant at that point of decision making, whether it is to enhance the customer experience and scale, whether it is to predict what should be the next best offer you can make to a client, whether it's analyzing sentiments that actually make your creative process of the campaign a lot more effective. Whether it is predicting what a path could look like if you engage in one campaign or the other. Those are the kinds of options and direction that is now available to us.”

“If we can bring all of this data together through technologies like AI, through watsonX that we use across the platform, the data and the governance of it, that is the promise that technology brings to all of us and particularly in this industry,” he adds.