Indian IT leaders are most confident in their IT infrastructure’s readiness for artificial intelligence (AI) technology, according to the Equinix 2023 Global Tech Trends Survey. More than 8 out of 10 IT leaders surveyed in India (85%) believe that their existing IT infrastructure is ready for the demands of AI, while only 56% in Asia-Pacific have certainty about the ability of their infrastructure for AI. The survey, which examined IT leaders’ responses to AI advances in their organizations, comes after a year of significant AI breakthroughs that saw the technology rapidly deployed in applications across both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer sectors.
Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India, commented: “In a disruptive world, agility is vital for driving innovation. Indian IT leaders must proactively address threats like cyberattacks, security breaches, and data leaks while complying with evolving data privacy regulations. Prioritizing cybersecurity and assessing risks is crucial, as is leveraging transformative technologies like 5G, AI, and IoT. AI, especially generative AI, has made significant strides, and its adoption in India is growing tremendously. AI will catalyze intelligent applications, empowering organizations to thrive in a dynamic digital landscape. Embracing AI is the key to resilience, competitive advantage, and sustainable growth.”
The survey confirmed AI uptake is on the rise across all industry sectors, withmore than 90% of the IT decision-makers polled in India seeking to benefit from the advantages of AI and already using or planning to use it across multiple key functions. Organizations are most likely to be using AI, or planning to do so, in IT operations (93%), followed by e-commerce (93%), and customer experience (92%).
Also, quality control/management (73%) is the most popular area for digital twin among Indian IT leaders. This is followed by operational performance optimization (63%), product development and re-design (56%), predictive maintenance (54%), systems planning (51%), and logistics planning (47%).
On implementing complex AI strategies, Aengus Tran, CEO & Co-Founder at harrison.ai, noted: “Secure hosting of our compute and data storage platforms is our highest technical priority as we build AI solutions for clinicians across the world. We rely on an extremely fast and direct connection to enable hybrid cloud models as required to move remarkably large data sets on which we train and develop our AI solutions. This digital infrastructure enables us to tackle bigger healthcare problems – from medical imaging solutions, to new AI healthcare solutions requiring more data and processing – helping to improve the standard of global healthcare and achieve our vision to impact one million lives per day.”
Asia-Pacific remains a strong region projected to contribute around 70% of global growth in 2023. Findings from the Equinix 2023 Global Tech Trends Survey confirm that 58% of Indian businesses planning to expand to new countries in the next 12 months.
In addition to digital infrastructure updates, the survey also highlightedthe need for education and collaboration to enable IT teams to optimize the deployment of this infrastructure, with AI and machine learning expertise being the most sought after(56%) by those growing their IT teams.