Global enterprises are expected to invest $98 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2023 and India’s share in it will be about $1 billion, said Project Management Institute (PMI), a Philadelphia-based non-profit organisation with about 28,000 individual members in India.
However, some $54 billion — 55% of this proposed global investment — may go waste due to lack of familiarity or understanding of newer practices, technologies and tools and inability to optimise data. Consequently, the corresponding wastage in India will be $484 million, as per PMI’s estimates.
Further, poor management practices alone may lead to global losses of $11 billion, that is 11.4% of the total investments of $98 billion. India’s individual share in the losses would be $81 million, based on data shared by the professional body. The global failure rate of 55% was applied to India as well, as there was no comparable data available for the country as of now, said Srini Srinivasan, MD, PMI South Asia.
”That means, more than half of AI investments, expected to be done by 2023, in India may also go waste. Project management methodology and framework are imported from traditional (legacy) practices and therefore are misfit for AI and Data Science projects,’’ he added.
Commenting on the importance of business understanding, data preparation and data modelling especially at a time when digital revenues of Indian tech firms are on a constant rise, Mr. Srinivasan said, ”Many companies are deploying AI projects through trial and error methods. The amount of experimentation that goes into AI projects is far greater than traditional projects. In AI, we are trying to imagine the future to create a new reality. To avoid failure, it is also critical to achieving 80% of the outcome from 20% of the data instead of going ocean surfing.’’
