With the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe, companies, schools and other services either went completely online or adopted various online tools to aid service delivery and coordinated working. With remote working kicking in and workforces moving online, technology companies were faced with a twin dilemma of adapting to unprecedented changes in work environments as well as ensuring and assisting their clients too, to move online. Sandip Patel, managing director, IBM India & South Asia, in an email interview, tells THE WEEK how IBM has been helping the complete ecosystem during the COVID-19 pandemic. Edited excerpts:
What were the immediate challenges that COVID brought before IBM?
The pandemic has caused widespread disruption. However, in the long term, this climate of turmoil and disruption could act as a catalyst for increased innovation and we believe that it will, ironically, help the global economy move onto a new path that could deliver stronger growth through accelerated digital transformation.
The challenges were two-fold: internally, we had to ensure safety and wellbeing of our employees—that was and will continue to remain our utmost priority.
Secondly, it was to ensure seamless business continuity and to provide robust disaster recovery solutions to minimise the impact of the disruption to every single client. This also included empowering our clients’ remote workforce to be productive and engaging (with them) by providing access to appropriate tools and solutions.
From banks to telcos to essential supplies, IBM has been supporting various organisations to seamlessly extend support and services to the citizens of the country during these times. For example:
Mother Dairy: IBM not only ensured 100 per cent availability of the infrastructure but also ensured a strong security compliance process adherence, even during the COVID-19 lockdown. During this critical period, the company enabled work from home for Mother Dairy employees.
AMUL: AMUL has a very complex supply chain, but despite the pandemic, IBM ensured that the entire IT Infrastructure was up and running 24x7.
With remote working here to stay for the long run, how has it impacted IBM's business—both as an employer and a technology enabler?
We are witnessing three fundamental industry shifts: first, we are seeing the acceleration of digital ecosystems touching every aspect of our lives. Second, new emerging business models are driving cost efficiency, agility and built on a foundation of trust. The last and truly defining shift—the emergence of a network economy that is defining a whole new way of working and interacting with people.
These shifts have not just accelerated digital transformation but requires all of us to look for better and more practical applications of technology, particularly in the form of AI, enabled through the better use of data sets that are now available to us.
The key focus here is on acceleration as the pandemic requires us to leverage technologies like Cloud and AI at a much faster pace and at scale and with more precision.
Let’s take IBM’s own example: Remote working has been a reality at IBM for decades, both to provide personal flexibility to employees in times of need and to enable a mobile workforce to operate from anywhere in the world. What has been different in the past few months is embracing this approach at scale, not just among our sizable employee population in India, but around the world. Our information technology (IT), human resources, business units, crisis management, legal, government relations, corporate social responsibility, operations and security teams have quickly come together to make WFH a reality for over 99 per cent of employees in India. More importantly, we have successfully enabled clients to make this transition concurrently, some who were not well-prepared or equipped to do so.
The other area we are absolutely committed to is employee skilling. A new set of skills that sit at the intersection of tech and business, is the need of the hour.
What new opportunities have the pandemic opened for IBM? What are the interesting works/collaborations being done?
In this current scenario, the world has entered into an extreme digitisation mode and technology has become the sutradhar – the unifying force – to help navigate through the pandemic. Technology is playing a key role in helping businesses navigate through these three fundamental shifts by: powering a new work paradigm; driving innovation for the greater good; and building sustained resilience.
Enterprises, for example, are putting AI at the centre of workflows, connecting with stakeholders, and using the insights generated from that process to enhance their products/services and innovate. This transformation is powered by a hybrid cloud architecture, using open source software that makes companies more secure and enables them to quickly adapt to shifting customer demands and changing market conditions. We also saw accelerating demand for digital transformations during the crisis, and this is an immediate opportunity for IBM.
So, the trend we see in the market is clear. Clients want to modernise apps, move more workloads to the cloud and automate IT tasks. They want to infuse AI into their workflows and secure their IT infrastructure to fend off growing cybersecurity threats. As a result, we are seeing an increased opportunity for large, transformational projects. IBM’s Cloud revenue more than doubled last quarter, while the India market witnessed growth and this was also called out during our quarterly earnings.
Explain how IBM is tapping in AI in delivering healthcare, supply chains and governance.
We have been supporting enterprises by making IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens on the IBM public cloud available at no charge for at least 90 days which will enable them to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19.
Here are some of our key initiatives around AI:
ICMR has collaborated with IBM to implement a Watson virtual agent (called Watson Assistant) on its portal to respond to specific queries of front-line staff and data entry operators from various testing and diagnostic facilities across the country on COVID-19. The virtual agent has been deployed on protected pages of the ICMR website that can be accessed only by authorised personnel who are involved with sample collection and testing in hospitals and diagnostic labs. The virtual agent understands and responds to queries in both, English and Hindi.
AI for retail supply chain: IBM Research India has developed state-of-the-art algorithms to enable intelligent self-correcting sustainable retail supply chains. The eventual goal is to ensure that the right product is at the right location at the right time and at the right price. The platform brings together data from multiple sources relevant to the client’s business and applies domain-trained AI algorithms to extract demand signals, model demand behaviour resulting in better forecasting.
Precision agriculture: We are putting precision agriculture to work by combining multiple, global satellite-based information sources aligned to the Weather Company data. The aim is to compute actionable agronomic insights (such as crop health stress alert, water stress, pest/disease risk forecast, etc) for individual farmers at sub-acre level. We have already worked with the Ministry of Agriculture to aid farmers in four districts—Rajkot, Nanded, Bhopal and Varanasi.
Conversational AI: IBM Research is leading the company’s efforts to develop new tools that enable AI to process and understand the complexities of natural language—the nuances, hidden meaning and context. These capabilities help enterprises get more insights from their data and have immediate use in areas such as customer care, where the frequent use of casual language has made accurate understanding, classification and fine-grained analysis difficult.
The pandemic has more or less done to edtech what demonetisation did to fintech. What's new in the edtech space for IBM?
As students and teachers turn to online education, India’s edtech space is witnessing unprecedented growth. One of the key areas we are working on is bridging the huge skill gap that exists in the country today. IBM’s initiatives are aligned to the national agenda and also resonate with the vision shared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his recent interaction with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, where they discussed India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat and Skill India vision. IBM has been at the forefront in partnering with the Indian government to empower millions of students and teachers with skills of the future. We believe that in this era, in the words of our CEO, we need not only “AI in education, but also AI for education.”
Here are some of our recent initiatives:
IBM unveiled ‘SkillsBuild Reignite’ platform to provide job seekers and entrepreneurs with access to free online coursework and mentoring support, designed to help them reinvent their careers and businesses.
IBM announced its collaboration with National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to offer ‘Open P-TECH’, a free digital education platform, focused on emerging technologies and professional development skills. As a part of the collaboration, IBM will curate online courses from Open P-TECH platform and offer it to users via NSDC’s eSkill India portal to empower Indian youth on various skills to succeed in future careers.
Recently, in collaboration with CBSE, IBM is integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the high school curriculum (Grade XI & XII) for the current academic year (2020 – 2021), in approximately 200 schools across 13 states in India.
Could you throw light on IBM's collaborative interest in the COVID research undertaken at National Institute of Technology – Warangal?
In other efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic at a global level, IBM, in collaboration with the US Department of Energy, launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that brought together governments, industry and academia to fight coronavirus with all the tools, including some of the sophisticated super computers ever built.
This consortium has made available 400 petaflops of computing power (for free) to researchers and scientists everywhere, accelerating their efforts to understand COVID-19, its treatment and potential cures. The consortium recently approved NIT Warangal to run an experiment on the COVID-19 Supercomputer. Their experiment will study the dependence of structure and dynamics of novel SARS-CoV-2 on temperature and humidity in the atmosphere.
Faculty at NIT Warangal are studying the impact of atmospheric conditions mainly the temperature and humidity and try to unravel if the virus undergoes any biophysical changes with change in atmospheric conditions. This study would open a new dimension in the characterization of SARS-CoV-2 and future corona family class of viruses in prevention, categorization and drug designing aspects. They have just begun the investigation and students might join in at a later stage of the study.
