Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of AI, says IBM India’s chief tech officer

IBM, which is working on many Covid-19 projects around the world, is convinced the pandemic has triggered an acceleration in innovation and adoption of technologies like artificial intelligence, with new use cases in retail and banking, but more importantly in managing and now mitigating a global pandemic.

Subram Natarajan, Chief Technology Officer of IBM India, has seen “dramatic changes” this year, along with a “fair bit of confluence of various technologies, AI being one of them”. While the lockdown forced many businesses to go digital to survive and adopt technologies like AI, Natarajan says it was the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in citizen’s services that have had the most significant impact.