Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the United States, Ravi Kumar, CEO of Cognizant and Nitin Seth, CEO of Incedo Inc believe that India and US relationship is at an inflection point.

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Kumar asserts that India has the potential to become the global hub for office operations, consumer markets, and data management.

On the other hand, Seth emphasises the need for the India-US partnership to advance in terms of defence and political cooperation. He highlights the vast opportunities that arise from the field of artificial intelligence, which can greatly enhance the relationship between the two countries.

Below are the excerpts of the conversation.

Q: What we are seeing today in the context of the broader relationship between India and the US is the fact that technology could be a big driver. In fact, the Indian ambassador to the US Taranjit Sandhu said that this could be the master key that unlocks the true potential of the partnership. How do you see it evolving?

Kumar: This is probably an inflection point, there is so much going on between India and the US. If you look at the trade partnership between the two countries on manufacturing goods and commodities, it is roughly around $150 billion. India is the 8th or the 9th partner for the US and the US is the number 1 partner for India.

For tech services, BPO services and services in general, India roughly has around $350 billion in exports. Almost $150-170 billion in tech services and BPO services and more than half, roughly 55 percent comes from the US. A lot of that was focused on tech services companies, big tech companies, actually delivering to enterprises in the US. And that has happened over the last 30 to 40 years.

The change we're going to see now and the headroom we see now, a significant part of the future is going to come from global capability centres getting set in India. And why is that an important thing? Technology is so core to businesses, for the last 40 years or so technology was actually in some ways an enabler to business. Technology is embedded into products and services and if that is the case, corporations in the US are going to set up their technology muscle, 1500 of them are already there, 200 got set up in the last two years, and another 300 are going to be set in the next three years.

So it's a fascinating opportunity because it creates heterogeneity in that landscape. The second I would say is the advancement of AI, deeply embedded into technology services and into the operational landscapes of enterprises. If India is going to be the office of the world for the next decade, you are going to have robots and people working together and robots amplifying human potential. It's a huge opportunity and I think India would be the robotic capital of the world.

The third, I would say, India has an amazing opportunity around new age software, SaaS companies. There is a small percentage of dollars, which actually gets exported to the US. But that's going to proliferate in the next few years. There are 20-odd unicorns, and that number is probably going to go 100, literally only in SaaS companies, these companies cater to US companies, especially the small and medium-sized businesses, which are roughly around 30 million businesses in the US. It's fascinating how the US is such a big country for small businesses. So all put together, this is going to be the next big wave of transformation, which India is going to go through.

I would believe the 5 million IT and BPO professionals which work in India, by the end of this decade, that number is going to double. And a lot of that is going to be between India and the US.

Q: The big bet is that this is going to be a tech-driven partnership and Ravi just articulated why he believes that to be the case. What are the structural shifts, the structural changes that you believe give us the advantage and what can be leveraged today?

Seth: We are in the digital age, so technology is driving the business, technology is driving this relationship. India has been building towards the inflection point for the last 20-25 years. And there are a number of structural advantages that India now has- our age pyramid, 65 percent of the population is below the age of 35. A lot of the IT services industry is a shining example of the success that India has created, and we are the global leader in that. Look at the smartphone penetration, look at the Aadhaar stack, we always have this image of India being cut off like a laggard- I moved from India to the US four years back, and I find that in many aspects of digital and technology infrastructure, India has leapfrogged. Digital payments are a very good example of that. So, these are four or five big structural shifts that have happened in India. Now, what does all of this mean? The nature of let's say, just the technology partnership between the US and India, I think is changing very, very significantly. The first is that India is no more just the software workers, it is not just the factory or the workforce for the US or for the world. And I think Ravi touched on this point, I think a lot of the intellectual capital creation is happening from India, and will happen more, because new technologies AI, robotics, blockchain, nobody really has a premium on those, everybody is trying to figure them out. And the ecosystem that has got created in India it's such a tremendous opportunity for the world. Yeah. So that's kind of one very big shift that India started by kind of doing the low end, being the coding capital, but I think it is now poised to become the intellectual capital. The second big shift is from supply to demand. India is already the fifth-largest economy, in the next four or five years, it's going to be the third-largest economy. It's a massive big point of consumption. Yeah. And as more and more services get digitised, that's a great opportunity for companies in the United States. So that is the second kind of big pivot, where it was, okay, US is the market, you supply from India, but I think that is also going to change.

Q: In the context of this relationship today, from a diaspora point of view, people like Ravi and Nitin sitting here heading businesses in India, you've got large corporations being run by Indian origin CEOs, you've got people in politics, in the White House as well of Indian origin, from an impact and an influence perspective, what do you believe has changed? And what would you like to see change from here?

Raj: If I look at the last five or 10 years, there has been an incredible impact, in terms of politics, in terms of the economy, in terms of policies, so the economy is pretty clear cut. The Indian-American community in the US is well-to-do, and that's very well-established. And, we have the CEOs of tech companies, we have CEOs of non-tech companies, it is remarkable how things have changed and developed over the last few years.

In terms of policies, there are an amazing number of high-level officials in the Biden government now, who are of Indian-American origin. The chief domestic policy adviser to the President is an Indian-American. The number two person in the state department is an Indian American, the person who runs the personnel department where all the appointments are made in the White House is an Indian American, and there are many others. So I think that the impact that we have now in government, in the economy has really become much more significant than I've ever, ever seen. And I think we have a long ways to go.

Right now in terms of politics, the Vice President is of Indian-American origin. We have five people in Congress who are Indian Americans and that number should be much higher over the long term.

We have a lot of people now at the state level, who want to fight for local elections. One other really gratifying thing that I've seen here is that the young men and women from our community, who are showing interest in political career is just amazing. And these are kids from Harvard, Stanford and Princeton, and what have you. And they are devoting their life to public service. So a remarkable change in the community, and how the community has taken on these three or four areas.

Q: US can help skill up India, but you're saying that India and Indian tech companies specifically can do the same at scale here in the US. Explain to me how?

Kumar: Because Indian companies have over the last 40 to 50 years taken talent from schools and colleges, have taken talent from radically different streams, and translated them to jobs in business processes engineering, top jobs in IT services, software engineering and I think that experiment can be replicated back in the US.

Q: What will make it happen? Will it need to be driven by the government? Will it need to be driven by the private sector, what will make it happen?

Kumar: The Indian tech services companies already do that. The Indian companies, which work in the private sector in the US already do that, we just have to scale it up. The US has 10 million open jobs and there are only 7 million people available. So if we do that, it's going to create a flywheel to create more jobs in India, because it's going to create downstream opportunities across. So I think it's a flywheel you can create on both sides to create an equal opportunity.

I think the template of IT services and BPO services, in some ways, it's a proven template. Ironically, the pandemic has given us the confidence to do more, because a lot of that got catalysed in the last two years to do more. One out of seven jobs is remote now. And before the pandemic, one out of 70 jobs were remote. So what that really means is you could virtualise work and literally do it out of India. So sectors like healthcare, healthcare is going to not just need human capital, it's going to go through significant digitisation because you are going to see connected health. So there is this opportunity to virtualise healthcare and actually take part of the value chain to an offshore destination like India. I will also say that healthcare workers which are needed all over the world, India can be a fascinating opportunity to extend what we did in IT services and BPO services to healthcare. Education- we have 4,000 edutech companies in India, which are reskilling capabilities in India, they can potentially traverse the world because you are going to see digital education in a big way.

India was known for STEM education, I think India's opportunity now is not just to do STEM education on one stream layer, but also do non-STEM disciplines. Because if AI and machines are going to take away problem-solving, the new human endeavour is going to be problem-finding. And if AI is going to amplify human potential, India can be a fascinating centre for non-STEM disciplines. And that diversity is going to give India a huge opportunity to address other sectors as well, as, as much as we have done that in IT services.

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Q: Let's get into the AI debate and the role and relevance of India in that. How do you believe India is positioned at this point in time in an AI era?

Seth: We are at a fascinating point with AI becoming not just a proof of concept, but really it's happening at scale now.

Q: But how worried are you because Yale has put out a study I just looked at a CNN report which talked about the majority of the CEOs polled as part of that survey believing that it is going to have very, very dire consequences over the next five to 10 years. We're not talking about way out into the future, we're talking about the next five to 10 years.

Seth: AI also brings in very exciting opportunities. You can't stop time, you can't stop flowing water, you can't stop technology, and you can't stop AI. So think about what opportunities it creates. And I think it creates tremendous, tremendous opportunities for India and for the US-India collaboration. How? It's not just about talent. What is AI predicated on? How does AI happen? Does AI happen through data? And especially for generative AI, you need vast, deep public datasets, without it AI cannot happen. India is potentially the largest source of data in the world.

One of the large countries, China, India, who is going to share data? India. So we are going into a new era, which is an era of data collaboration. We have gone through an era of trade collaboration. Now, it is about data collaboration. India is amazingly well placed to create massive data sets, which then form the backbone on which AI will happen. Ravi touched on healthcare, this is such an amazing example. In the United States, healthcare costs are 18 percent of the country's GDP, it's massive, it is significantly, administrative, and also there is a huge cost of drug discovery. Now, a lot of that underlying data, you can conceptualise happening in India, some of that already we began to see over COVID. And now those big data sets, get shared globally and the United States is a key partner and AI applications get built on top of that. And by the way, a lot of that AI talent is there in India. So I just feel that this is a leapfrog opportunity.

Kumar: I completely agree with what Nitin said. In the last three months, we went from a discourse of what can I do to AI will save the world to AI will destroy the world. We've just got it in three months, so I completely agree with what Nitin is saying.

For the foundational models built by big techs, I hope more open source happens, For those models, if they have to go production-grade, you need population-grade data. The digital stack of India is probably the best example in any country in the world, which can give you diverse datasets. Why has generative AI become so popular? We went from narrow datasets, which had narrow errors and which had predictable outcomes. The big shift in genetic AI is we went to large data sets, unrelated data sets, unlabelled data sets, and with a lot of error, and therefore it gives you new content. That new content can be fine-tuned, and curated with data sets, which will make it contextual, and India can provide that. So India can be the data capital of the world because of the digital infrastructure India built on over the last few years and consumerised, that data can be used by the foundational models to make it production-grade and then cater to the world.

I actually think it's a fascinating example of how India can, not just be the office of the world, the factory of the world, the consumer of the world, and the data capital of the world.

Q: Since we're talking about data collaboration and India being the data capital, data protection and regulation is a challenge today, we don't have it?

Kumar: I think the world is going through that phase of how do we regulate AI? I've been with policymakers, I'm on the board of the US Chamber, and we are all debating on how we regulate and how we get partnerships between countries to create frameworks, and regulations, which will support acceleration of the embrace of AI, as much as it will make it responsible enough? I think India has an exceptionally good opportunity to partner with countries like the US, to be part of the consortium of early regulatory frameworks, which we can build.

Seth: You touched on a very good point around, data security, data privacy, and of course global standards need to evolve on this and there is a fair amount of work happening. But again, I want to underline the essential power of it, and what will make it happen. What will make it happen is this notion of data democratisation. Data historically was a source of power and you held it in a kind of like a box, in a silo. Now, with AI and generative AI, that entire concept is changing. It is about scale, it's not about narrow and deep, it's about broad and deep. You have to democratise data. You have to democratise access to data. That is where I believe that maybe it's a philosophical statement that the whole democratic nature of India and the US makes us natural partners for that collaboration to happen. Because let's kind of put the elephant in the room, China. China is making amazing advancements in AI where it is likely to be in a more defined and protected space, whereas that's not the story with India.

Kumar: The other thing is in generative AI, of all the discontinuities in technology which have happened so far, including the democratisation of technology, for the first time, you're going to move the agency of technology to the user. India actually, in some ways, handed over that agency of data to the user in the last decade. So it kind of really matches, it's a natural fit for the agency to be handed over and to take the raw power of technology and to unleash it.

Seth: What it means for a country like India is, you could have kids in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, who have access to content being developed at Harvard and Stanford. So think about that world.

Kumar: It's fascinating what's happening in schools, children know how to use AI and the teachers are not allowing them to use it. Businesses are figuring out how to use it.

Q: What would you put down as the single biggest bet in terms of forging this partnership to be deeper?

Kumar: I would say, partnership upstream with the evolution of these foundation models, and the power of data which India provides, the digital stack of India which has transactions at a micro level, which India provides, I think bringing that together, the confluence of the two is going to make AI more mainstream. AI was always mainstream in the consumer world in the last few years, it's now going to go mainstream in the business world. And the talent pool, which is available, can actually support the curation process.

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Q: What would you be mindful of though?

Seth: There is very natural progress happening on trade, technology, the people front, and culture, but the partnership has to evolve on defence and political collaboration. Without that, there is a very important ingredient that is missing. And I think there is a kind of a resettling that is needed, and I think a shift in mindsets, both in the United States, perhaps also some in India.

Q: Confident of the great reset that Nitin just spoke of?

Raj: I think just to recapture a couple of things here, I think we are at an inflection point in many, many ways. Inflection point in terms of the US-India relationship, inflection point in India as we have discussed here, inflection point in new technologies. I think the world is changing very fast around us. And I think that we need to build a feeling of trust between the two nations. And I think that will be an advantage to both the US and India. I think we both have to rise to the challenge and work collectively for a better future.