It’s time for emerging markets to wake up to the AI potential

We live in times where algorithms pulse through our daily lives, suggesting movies, predicting weather, and even composing music. But Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t just the domain of tech giants and secretive research labs. It belongs to everyone, now woven into the fabric of our digital existence.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while emerging and developing economies face lower risks from AI, the opportunities are lesser too. This can be the beginning of a chasm between the haves and have nots that could widen in the future. But it shouldn’t be that way.

Read more: “The consumer in emerging markets should expect vast, radical change in everyday life soon because of AI”

Last November, Sam Altman hosted OpenAI’s first demo day, showcasing how AI technology is easily available to everyone – and how it’s going to touch the lives of every person on the planet. He said that over 100 million people now use GPT on a weekly basis, and more than 2 million people are using their API. 

Michael Puscar, an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and a published data scientist, and the CTO of NPCx, told The Tech Panda  that what he found most compelling was the demo showing how a layman can easily train an “agent” – a type of chatbot that can be trained with images and documents.

“He showed how you can take a diary, or papers that someone has written, or transcripts of their conversations, and easily hold a conversation with an AI that will respond eerily similar,” he recalls.

Puscar says it’s time for emerging market consumers to wake up to AI. “The barriers to implement AI technology are now gone. You no longer need to be a data scientist, an engineer, or even a programmer. It is 1997 again, but instead of the Internet, the technology that is changing industry is artificial intelligence. There is a gold rush to implement this technology across every industry, from virtual travel agents to wine recommendation engines, from customer service to accounting,” he explains.

India pioneered the service economy in the 1990s with outsourcing but AI now puts that sector at risk. However, despite India’s AI market being half the size of China’s, GlobalData research suggests India’s market growth outpaces that of China. In fact, the India AI market size was estimated at US$ 672.11 million in 2022.

“The country is poised to pivot from outsourcing to artificial intelligence. Indian companies have intimate knowledge of the manual and repetitive tasks that usually accompany an outsourced project, and that means those same companies have a unique advantage in the race to automate those processes using AI,” he adds.

Read more: Big tech to bigger tech with AI: Money pours in, AI gets better & vice versa

“But the clock is indeed ticking,” he adds. “Just like the Internet boom of the 1990s that created Google (1998), Amazon (1994), eBay (1995), and PayPal (1998), thousands of entrepreneurs will create successful companies based on AI technology, and a few hundred will build multi-billion dollar companies. And just like the boom of the 90’s, this opportunity won’t last forever. The time is now.”

If Asia wants to join the big leagues of technology companies and wants to keep pace with developed economies, AI brings that chance closer than ever. It’s time to leverage.