Microsoft’s ‘Week of AI’ ropes in Flipkart and InMobi execs for insights

• Microsoft is launching ‘Week of AI' to help companies and employees understand how artificial intelligence (AI) is going to impact the workforce.
  
• AI experts from Flipkart and InMobi will be conducting workshops to share how AI is helping to power their own platforms.
  
• Week of AI should help employees and business leaders alike understand the importance of reskilling in India.
  

Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role in how businesses will shape up in the future. In order to increase awareness on the applications of AI, Microsoft has launched ‘Week of AI' which will last for five days.

Though the agenda largely comprises of Microsoft executives and developers from CloudThat Technologies, AI experts from Flipkart and InMobi will also join in to provide insights on how they're using AI to power their own platforms.

"The jobs of today will not be the jobs of tomorrow," said Ranganath Sadasiva from the International Data Corporation. The demand for AI jobs aren't restricted just to the technology sector either.

Sadavisa explains, "We have already seen demand for software engineering roles expand rapidly beyond just the tech sector. Microsoft believes that development of talent pipelines is vital for economic growth and this initiative is part of the company's commitment to upskilling India for an AI ready future."

Microsoft's National Technology Officer in India, Rohini Srivathsa, shares a similar view stating, "Today, every company is a software company, and increasingly, every interaction is digital."

AI's potential in India

AI will increase the productivity of organisations by 2.3 times. It also holds the potential to increase industrial innovation by 2.2 times, according to a new study published by Microsoft and IDC.

The study also highlights that AI's key drivers are higher margins, higher competition, accelerated innovation, better customer engagement and productivity of employees.

As AI is set to take over a lot of the repetitive tasks at the workplace, business leaders and employees differ on its ultimate impact. While some believe it will result in job replacement, others think that it might not be that big a threat.

Week of AI resonates with aspirations that the company shared during Microsoft Build 2019, its annual developers conference. The tech giant said that it wanted to bring more developers into its fold, with or without a background in data science or AI, to use to tools that Microsoft had to provide.

Wisam Hirzalla, the director of operational databases and blockchain marketing at Microsoft, stated in one of the company's blogs, "We want to make it easy for any company to use the technology."