Tech for good set to be a growing trend with startup-tech innovations, says Kumara Raghavan of AWS at ET Soonicorns Summit

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Edited excerpts from the interview:

EconomicTimes.com: During the pandemic, businesses were forced to digitise making them migrate from optimised computing to cloud computing and now enterprises are realising the nimbleness, flexibility, scalability that cloud offers. Can you give us a sense of how things have changed in the way companies are approaching and leveraging their businesses on cloud, between the pre-and post-pandemic times?

Kumara Raghavan: Pandemic was quite a life-changing experience for all of us. With everyone turning to digital avenues to meet their daily buying needs for groceries or even their educational needs, there was a very rapid adoption of digital services as a default. This made businesses shift from on-premise computing to cloud-computing, so that it could support their fast fueled technology driven growth. Cloud computing has been a big contributor to this rapid pace of digitization globally, especially in the last two years. So, the everyday benefits that technology offers is something that we constantly see.

The market projections by an IDC report pegs India’s public cloud services market to reach $13.5 billion by 2026. This would make India among the fastest-growing markets for public cloud service as a whole. Besides, startups have played a big role in the adoption of cloud services in India. Everyone wants to reduce their costs, and cloud is a good way to go about that but the advantage really is in the kind of agility that cloud provides.

EconomicTimes.com: Businesses are recognising the significance of digital technology in the aftermath of the pandemic and a lot of them are investing or attempting to invest in AI. Can you give us a sense of what the off-take has been of these products and any particular sector or industry, where you’re seeing, perhaps an unexpected interest in AI?


Kumara Raghavan: We are quite enthusiastic about machine learning technology and our startup customers are too. India is a growing economy and we see the scope for AI and ML becoming very broad. Initially, it was used as a mechanism for bringing in efficiency but now you see a huge amount of innovation happening in this area as well. There’s a significant momentum in adopting ML across verticals, whether it is healthcare, gaming, edtech or fintech.

So, the way we look at AI and ML is in three layers. At the first layer, we look at the basic infrastructure that goes into building an AI/ML capability. The second layer of technology is what we call the Amazon SageMaker – it’s a fully managed machine learning service that helps data scientists and developers prepare, build, train, and deploy high quality ML models by bringing together a broad set of capabilities. And then we have a set of ready-made offerings like Amazon Textract that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents.

EconomicTimes.com: Recent data from the government showed that over 50% of startups are from Tier II and Tier III cities. There are other trends as well which we’ve seen through the pandemic like work from home and the gig economy. Beyond creating demand for services and products, how do you see these trends and markets really powering India’s economic promise?

Kumara Raghavan: India is definitely undergoing a very steady but very unique trend, which is that experienced professionals and startup founders are going from metros to the tier-2 cities. And you see a lot of innovation coming from these tier-2 cities in areas across artificial intelligence, climate technologies, and IoT, among others. The growth of startups and startup initiatives in these small towns in India have not only proven to be effective for the startup founders and entrepreneurs, but these cities themselves are reaping the significant benefits due to the advancements taking place in their backyard. So there’s clearly a very strong momentum in the startup ecosystem from the tier-2 cities. And we are engaged with the founders to ensure that they have the resources to build their businesses with full access to the length and breadth of AWS services.

EconomicTimes.com: Tech is regarded as the key to solving so many of the world’s problems. But while tech can accelerate progress, it can potentially exacerbate inequalities. How do we drive tech for good, especially in India?

Kumara Raghavan: Businesses have realised that making the switch to sustainable business practices provides an opportunity in itself for new and innovative ideas. So the call for private and public sectors to collaborate on sustainable innovation is quite strong. And the usage of cloud technology is one path to achieve this.

You can definitely put technology to good use and I think we will see more and more of this innovation happening in future. And even for areas where technology was not previously accessible, I think they will feel the impact of it one way or the other. And in the time to come, I definitely see that as a growing trend.