Prakash Mallya , recently appointed MD for Sales and Marketing, Intel India , is back in his homeland after 12 years. A 17-year veteran at Intel, the Lucknow-born Mallya says Intel wants to democratise artificial intelligence by making it as inexpensive as possible. In his first interview after taking over in February, Mallya also tells ET about the scope for PCs in India, and opportunities for Intel.

Edited excerpts:

What is the work done by Intel on the artificial intelligence (AI) front in India? There are a few barriers we are trying to break through in AI globally and in India. Our single biggest desire is to make AI as inexpensive as possible, i.e., democratising AI. That's the reason we announced on the 'AI Day' training 15,000 people on developers, partners and ecosystem providers. We have alliance with online education providers for AI-specific courses.

The second part is the tools for AI are not very easy to use. So, we are trying to simplify those tools. Third is standardisation. As long as we have standards-based solutions and infrastructure even in AI space, I think we will succeed as an industry. Because standards drive costs to go down and hence many more people to use it.

How are you engaging with AI startups in India? Reports say that there are about 300 AI startups in India, many of them doing work in healthcare, education, etc. I have met customers doing work in video surveillance and analytics in the videos space using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms. We are engaged with companies that are in human resource space that are using AI. There are agriculture-oriented companies that are into ML and DL applications.

Is there a growth opportunity for personal computers (PCs) in India? If you look at PC penetration, it's single digit today. Digitisation in India provides citizens to adopt technology. GST (goods and services tax) is an example. We have millions of SMEs (small and medium enterprises).

I truly believe that the adoption of GST is an opportunity for companies to leverage on technologies like PCs to automate their processes. As the GST rollout happened on July 1, I do see the transformation in the SME space to be significant.

From a content creation, learning and education standpoint, PCs are vital. Hence, the work that we do with the government, MHRD (ministry of human resources development), etc. is oriented towards sharing the value of using PCs.

How are you working with the government? Do you have a business unit dedicated to government sales? Yes, we have a government-focused team in India. There are lots of effort being put in video surveillance, smart transportation, etc. Have we reached a stage where everything is figured out and large deployment underway? No. But, we are making serious progress. There are proof of concepts, there are requirements on the datacentre front and the edge device deployment.

I am optimistic that over a period of time, the vision of 100 smart cities will get realised on usages, deployment, and improving the citizens' quality of life. With respect to newer technology like IoT (internet of things), there is an evolution in our requirement.

For demands like smart cities and private sector digitisation across industrial, across surveillance, or healthcare, you see people test different usages.

Link:

Want to make Artificial Intelligence as inexpensive as possible: Prakash Mallya, MD for Sales and Marketing, Intel India - Economic Times