We had an exciting conversation with Priyanshu Joshi on the trends, challenges, misconceptions, and applications of Artificial Intelligence in everyday life and in time of pandemic.
Please can you give us a little background about yourself and your current role?
Priyanshu Joshi has graduated with a bachelor’s in computer science engineering from Rajasthan Technical University and a master’s in international business from Hult International Business School. He is a Six Sigma Black Belt certified professional with extensive experience in the energy and information technology sector. Priyanshu is CEO and Cofounder of Diginix AI IT Solutions (Dubai). Priyanshu along with his co-founder and CTO, Nishant Pandey has come a long way and developed multiple state of art products. A few of their prominent products are Smart E Police and Traction, where Smart E Police, an autonomous platform for UP Police (Indian State). A 3 years project which included complete study and understanding of the Police force system of India and includes end to end digitalization of the policing system. The product comprising over 60 applications in a single platform shall not be mistaken with a single application running on Google and Apple store, but it is a complete Police Force Ecosystem and a world-class product beating the rankings of some prominent government police applications in play store rankings. Product was tested live in the world’s largest fest “Kumbh Mela 2019” where it facilitated over 30 million people for 45 days and reduced the force deployment time from 10 hours to 2 hours.
Our second product “Traction” is a high-quality product with a complete restaurant management ecosystem and has been running live in 120 restaurants for the last 2 years. Traction is a multi-language platform with presence not only in the UK but also in Africa, UAE, and India. Recently we have launched the product in the MENA region.
Both products work on advanced data analytics and some modules involve machine learning as well. Diginix AI has successfully delivered several service projects for the industrial sector which are mainly focus on Artificial intelligence.
What are the most common misconceptions about Artificial Intelligence?
AI will take away the jobs, AI is totally machine-dependent, AI is dangerous, AI can-not solve my problem are the regular and common misconceptions that we hear in this industry. I’ll say it’s just ignorance or unwillingness to know more about AI.
Artificial intelligence is a future, no it’s not dangerous, AI follows human command, logics, and instructions already coded during the system development. Agreeing on the fact that the system is autonomous, but it thinks what we want it to think and executes what we want the system to execute. AI operations and their accuracy totally depend on the data input, which is done by Humans. Hence it’s human dependent. The major problem of these misconceptions arises because people are not aware of the application of AI and how it can improve their daily business giving them a prominent profitable growth.
Most of the businesses do not hire AI engineers or Data scientists, who can guide them to improve the existing system running in their industry for generations. Though I am not worried about these misconceptions much because AI will disrupt every industry tomorrow and tomorrow is coming sooner than we thought. I believe in coming 5 to 10 years, every existing software, technology, industry even normal human life will be mold in AI/ML systems.
What are the common uses and applications of AI?
Artificial intelligence and its applications are growing exponentially, everyday people are getting aware of AI and integrating it with their generation-old business.
AI in general reduces the manpower and increases the efficiency of work, making it more accurate with relentless execution and operational excellence. AI can help in analyzing a massive amount of data in a short period of time and techniques like deep learning, machine learning can help in producing accurate results with self-improvement in previous results. The massive use of AI in recent times has been seen in poverty maps, automating agriculture practices, and supporting irrigation, climate change, waste management, healthcare industry, predicting consumption patterns, monitoring, and streamlining energy usage.
There is a great demand in the market for Sentimental analysis where industries can know about the sentiments of people about their product using Artificial intelligence.
A machine can go through a thousand GB of data on the internet and can provide views of the public about their product or any individual as per the requirement. Machine learning keeps improving the accuracy of the prediction throughout its lifetime.
The most common AI application we can notice these days are virtual assistance on calls and advanced chatbots. Almost every bank and customer care unit has replaced manpower with chatbots & virtual assistance to increase productivity.
Here Chatbot and virtual assistance help the company to direct the query to correct department and reduces the turnaround time to resolve the query. Small issues are handled by the virtual assistance itself, where human interaction is not required.
If we talk about space, AI is the key. My belief is that long space travel is only possible by machines or humanoids. Where either the human brain can be integrated with machines to increase its life and durability or we create a machine that can mimic the human brain.
We can discuss AI applications all day long as there are endless opportunities to work with AI.
What are the trends and challenges that AI and automation face right now?
If we talk about 5 years to 10 years back, AI was considered as a threat. There was a general tendency of people to avoid anything associated with AI but now the time has changed.
We have been getting inquiries from a large corporation and majorly from SME’s regarding AI incorporations in their business. In general, their requirements end with Advance data analytics but they use the buzz word AI in their RFQ. Which shows the general acceptance of AI by the people. The demand for AI has been increased exponentially in the recent past and a major challenge for us is to explain the business how AI can help them with increase in productivity and profitable business growth. People want AI but they don’t know how it can help them.
Do you think replacing a lot of jobs with AI will turn out negative for the people working those jobs? What should they do instead?
AI doesn’t take human jobs, it just provides more accuracy to a running function. Its guiding force for business to increase the productivity. At the end of the day, AI work with Human command, it provides the results which are accepted or rejected by humans hence there is always a human interaction at the start and at the end of the node. Yes, applications of AI takes its own decisions, but everything is programmed by a human. Just like parenting a child.
There are some cases where AI can perform better work as compared to manual labor but that should be considered as a part of evolution. Don’t we all want to perform better in our business? AI works on data, better is the data input, better will be Machine Learning Results. Hence if AI eats up the job from one segment, it will increase the demand in other segment, for example Data analytics. Every decade comes with a new technology, which requires new skills. Earlier Typewriters use to be considered best, now computers have taken its place. Similarly, with letters to emails, landlines phones to mobile phones and many more examples we can correlate with. People need to have a growth mindset and improve their skills as per market requirements.
AI has increased the scope of data analytics extensively and I see a lot of jobs coming in the same sector in the near future.
How AI can be helpful in the situation of COVID-19 and world crisis?
COVID-19 has been a massive scale crisis that has potentially dragging countries into recession. Researchers are working to find out solution for COVID-19 at war hooting mode but the data is too large to handle for human intelligence alone.
Hence AI has been playing an active role in supporting researchers, governments, healthcare systems and various agencies to fight against COVID-19. AI application has been supporting from the very beginning of this pandemic. COVID-19 detection through facial recognition & fever detection AI has been extremely helpful in detecting the virus at international airports, mall entrances, and places where mass is expected.
There have been more than a million cases of COVID-19 across the world, now you can imagine the amount of people must have got tested and inquired for the test. This huge amount of data has been handled by virtual healthcare chatbots, another application of AI. These chats bots have the capability to understand multiple languages and answer the general queries related to COVID-19, hence promoting an effective and fast means of communication.
To curb the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have imposed locked down across the country. To monitor these locked downs, governments have been using advanced drones to detect public movements and identify areas for appropriate action. These drones are intelligent enough to understand human body language and send real-time information to concerned departments forcing prompt action by the duty personnel.
Tests for COVID-19 was another problem for health care authorities. Millions of people wanted to get tested and it was necessary for the government to find out COVID-19 positive people asap to quarantine them. At the early stages of the COVID-19, tests were taking at least 4 days to come out with a result, but AI has changed the whole ball game by giving the test result in 15 min. Thousands of people were getting tested within a day and hence allowing the government to take prompt action. There are many other AI applications in the market, which has been impacting the everyday life of people.
Who are the people that inspire you?
I am most inspired by entrepreneur businessmen and philanthropist Ratan Tata and entrepreneur Elon Musk. I love the way Mr. Ratan Tata has incorporated human values into his business, where social responsibility comes first not only on paper but it’s visible on the ground. The vision of the company and its products are developed and designed to support the life of the common man. Whereas entrepreneur Elon Musk has always been known to bring new ideas on the table and executing them with full confidence. There might be thousands of people against him and his idea but he makes sure to execute it with accuracy and make it a successful business.
I take positive things from both, confidence from Mr. Musk and humanity from Mr. Tata.
