‘Unlike crypto, AI has real world problems to solve,’ says Salesforce’s Arundhati Bhattacharya
Arundhati Bhattacharya, the Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce India believes that the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) brings with itself a host of issue that need to be addressed. Despite her reservations, she adds that the technology cannot be overlooked due to its immense use cases.
“When it comes to AI, there is an issue of bias, there is an issue of trust, the issue of liability, the issue of privacy, and they all need to be addressed. And many people are working on coming up with the solutions for this,” the CEO of the tech company said.
Because of these reservations, she added that use cases of AI are majorly in assistive roles, where the technology is helping a worker in completing a task efficiently and quickly.
“Right now, AI is assisting workers, we are not letting it run amuck. It is helping as an assistant, for example to write basic run of the mill code, or write reports, etc. but still there is human supervision on the work that is done by the AI,” she said.
Bhattacharya added that apart from the ethical concerns regarding AI, there are economic factors too that are limiting widespread adoption across enterprises.
“Not just that, it’s also a question of price. Believe me, at this point, the amount of compute capability it takes up is huge. The question is will we be able to do this all at a price that is affordable,” she added.
Despite her reservations, she believes in the potential of AI’s capabilities of solving real world use cases. She contrasted AI with blockchain technology and said, “Blockchain and crypto didn’t actually have a specific problem to solve. But in the case of AI, especially generative AI, there are real world problems it can solve. Moreover, the good thing about generative AI is that it democratizes the intake of data.”
The CEO also spoke of use cases for the Indian markets that might be relevant. She took up the case of the Indian BFSI sector and noted that integration of generative AI will help in bringing personalization to customer relationship management.