How U.S.-India Partnerships Can Drive the Spread of AI Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a topic of concern and celebration in recent years, especially with the widespread usage of programs such as ChatGPT. The security concerns have seemingly outweighed the benefits this technology can bring internationally, especially within India and the United States.

The development of India’s digital economy provides vast potential for ongoing growth in the nation, and strategic partnerships between the United States and India offer valuable opportunities for both countries. In the Chamber of Commerce’s 48th annual India Ideas Summit, industry leaders discussed the framework and collaboration required to grow and regulate this emerging technology.

Breaking Down Data Silos and Techno-Nationalism Makes AI More Widely Accessible

India and the United States are two of the most prominent digital economies in the world, and a combination of the countries’ resources and populations has the potential to expand AI capabilities. However, differences in privacy laws between countries often create obstacles to partnerships.

“Techno-nationalism has led to many nation states introducing data privacy [and] digital sovereignty rules that force data and technology to be resident within a particular country,” said Kris Lovejoy, Global Security & Resilience Leader at Kyndryl. “And what we have to understand is when you create silos of data and technology, it creates complexity.”

Kamal Ahluwalia, President at Ikigai Labs, added that when considering partnerships with countries such as Russia or China, “Everything goes into those countries. Nothing comes out.” 

Breaking these silos and encouraging collaboration between other nations, including the U.S. and India, are key to growth in this sector.

Women and the Younger Workforce Play a Key Role in the Expansion of AI

Growth in technology relies on having the workforce trained and available to help — and, as of 2023, half of the population is being underutilized in the tech world, according to the panelists. 

“There's been a lot of wealth creation in each of the last technology jumps, but it is largely concentrated and mostly in the hands of men,” Ahluwalia said. “We simply don’t have enough women in the leadership roles.”

Lovejoy agreed, citing the importance of representation for growth in technology.

“We've got 3.5 million open jobs. Women represent 50% of the world's population. If only 10% of the [tech] population is women, you need to bring more women in,” said Lovejoy. “It's important to ensure that you have the right representation at the upper layers to bring the teams underneath into a place where they can begin to sort of extend and expand themselves.”

Ahluwalia added that India has the largest young workforce, a relatively untapped market in the emerging technology sector.

“If we are able to equip them to thrive and ride the AI wave, you solve two problems,” he explained. “One is the participation [in the economy] … and the second is, U.S. companies need the workforce.”

Cyber Resilience Paves the Way for a More Inclusive, Collaborative Industry

Moving forward, Lovejoy believes that we should change our perspective on cybersecurity and begin to look at it as “cyber resilience.”

“We really worry about cybersecurity,  when at the end of the day we should be worried about the resilience of our governments [and] of our organizations,” Lovejoy explained. “Cyber resilience is all about the anticipation, the ability to protect, the ability to withstand and then recover from any and all cyber-related events.”

She added that AI has the potential to “[create] a situation where [there are] the haves and the have nots… there is the potential for us to create more economic inequality.”

By training more of the workforce on AI capabilities, breaking data silos, and cooperating with one another, Lovejoy believes we’ll all be able to use AI to its full potential.