Indian manufacturing firms see over 20% rise in AI-ML adoption: PwC

Manufacturing companies in India have seen a surge of over 20% in their adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions over the last two years, according to a report published on Tuesday by global consultancy firm PwC. 

Over the past two years, from mid-2020 to 2022-23, this sector has seen the maximum increase of in the adoption and implementation of AI/ML solutions, the study said.

Moreover, many of these companies started AI/ML implementations in the 12–18-month period following the pandemic, and have reaped maximum benefits from AI in three business functions — namely, manufacturing and operations, supply chain and logistics, and IT and cybersecurity, the PwC report noted. 

Indranil Mitra, Managing Director & Leader — Advanced Analytics, PwC India, said that as the volume of enterprise data grows, it is becoming increasingly important to leverage this data in a meaningful way. Companies that are using AI to model this data are reaping the benefits of business transformation enabled by effective decision making. 

Almost 64% of companies in manufacturing sector, however, said that they are currently at an early stage of their AI-based transformation journey reflecting the opportunities for further investments and growth led by AI/ML solutions in this sector. 

The sector is also undergoing a transformation with the advent of generative AI, the study said. Organisations can now use cutting-edge tools and solutions to streamline operations, increase efficiency, and enhance the customer experience. 

E-commerce company Flipkart, for example, has leveraged generative AI's potential to help connect consumers to products they could be interested in purchasing. Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Flipkart, for example, is using generative AI to build high-quality content for their products, and build more human-like assistants to help the user through the discovery, purchase, and post-purchase customer service journey, among other use cases.

MakeMyTrip is currently using advanced AI and ML technology proof-of-concept work that the company can use in its summarisation capabilities for reviews. Pocket FM is using generative AI to automate long-tail content creation, trailers and promos and to create personalised recommendations. According to the platform's Co-founder and CTO Prateek Dixit, the technology has reduced translation time by more than 40% at the company.
A study by technology firm Rackspace done in April 2023 showed that IT leaders are increasingly assigning higher priority to AI as adoption continues to increase — even amid uncertain economic conditions. 

According to the study, globally too, 69% organisations in the manufacturing sector are actively turning to AI/ML to meet their critical business challenges and to remain competitive, an increase of 15 percentage points as compared to the previous year.  

However, 67% of survey respondents cited the shortage of skilled talent as their top obstacle. Notably, organisations are also proactively addressing the skills gap. In fact, 82% of respondents said, they have made efforts to recruit employees with AI/ML skills in the past 12 months, while 86% of respondents have grown their AI/ML workforce over the same period. 

There are other challenges as well. "AI tools needs continuous monitoring and fine-tuning to produce accurate output," Sumanta Kar, Technology Partner at EY India said in an article published on Mint on 17 May, 2023.

According to Mitra, to truly differentiate themselves from the competition, "companies must have a deep understanding of the risks around security, privacy, and accountability.” 

The PwC study also showed that other sectors such as media and telecom (15%), healthcare and pharmaceutical (7%) and travel and hospitality (7%) have also shown an increase in the number of respondents that having deployed enterprise wide AI/ML solutions at scale in the last 3 years. 

In comparison, the retail and consumer industry witnessed a marginal decrease of 6% in 2022–23 as compared to 2020, triggered by the gap in identification of the right use cases and measuring the RoI, the study said.