AUGUST 20188By Gaurav Sachdeva, Managing Director, JSW VenturesA part of the diversified multi-billion dollar JSW Group with interests in steel, energy, infrastructure and cement JSW Ventures provides capital to early stage companies with building innovative products, services or technology advancements.IN MY OPINIONINVESTING IN MACHINE LEARNING: MAKING WAY FOR A DIGITALLY `INTELLIGENT' INDIAf there were two facts any in-vestor was to say with convic-tion about opportunities in the Indian market, the first would be that start-ups, innovating to-wards unique solutions, are the big-gest bet in a rapidly digitizing world. Second would be the emerging tech-nologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), which have already started redefining every as-pect of businesses- from functions to products. According to a recent report by Research and Markets, the global machine learning market is expected to grow from USD 1.41 Bn in 2017 to USD 8.81 Bn in 2022. This works out to a CAGR of 44.1%. The driving fac-tors are both a massive increase in data generation as well as rapid ad-vances in the technology itself. This technology innovation has been led in part by startups that are leverag-ing artificial intelligence (AI) and ma-chine learning to develop solutions that boost the capability of busi-nesses to process data into efficient actions. This is particularly true for India, which is witnessing a surge in the number of technology start-ups that are experimenting consistent-ly with machine learning and AI, to craft solutions that have India spe-cific and global applications. The fields are rapidly getting entrenched into the core of businesses in various industries that are revisiting their business functions and practices to kickstart a digital transformation, amidst the government's drive to es-tablish India's technological prowess by strengthening the role and the contribution of start-ups in its over-all growth story.Investing in the FutureIn India, where connected devices and connectivity are exponentially increasing, companies are witness-ing a surge for automation for accu-rate insights, derived with minimal time, cost and human intervention. This sets the base for the growth being witnessed in the segments of machine-learning and AI, whose de-mands for experts are expected to grow by nearly 60% by the end of this year. With more start-ups ad-dressing these demands, investors need to consider investing in these emerging technologies that play as a direct contribution to nurturing an aspect that is likely to be a certainty in the future. With hardware getting increas-ingly affordable the consequent af-fordability of computing resources, sectors like IT and infrastructure, are now enhancing their reliability on machine learning and AI to make processes smarter and more con-nected. Sensors, predictive mainte-nance, analytical models and pattern recognition, that run on these two technologies are now rapidly be-coming a norm to strengthen busi-nesses and public infrastructure like railways, civil aviation, nuclear plants, telecommunication towers and power stations. It is this wide-I
< Page 7 | Page 9 >