Deloitte launches India-centred global generative AI market incubator

Global consultancy company Deloitte has launched a Global Generative AI Market Incubator to promote innovation in generative artificial intelligence and serve businesses in India and abroad.

In an official statement released last week, Deloitte said the "AI incubator will leverage the in-depth sector knowledge and AI/ML expertise of our professionals, including data scientists and engineers. They will work through a multi-disciplinary model built on design thinking to ensure speed, faster time to market, and immediate value generation in critical projects."

Saurabh Kumar, partner at Deloitte, told Business Standard that the incubator will help small and medium enterprises in India incorporate AI tools into their projects as well as design and upscale their generative AI tools on their own.

In the Indian market, Deloitte said, there is a demand for generative AI in four buckets — for text-based searches and summarisation, content generation (product design, for example), from coding to testing in the software development cycle, and deploying smarter virtual assistants with internal and external data integrations.

The incubator, Kumar pointed out, is not merely to build accelerators or solutions that can then be released into the market, but to co-create early-stage projects with Deloitte's various clients.

The global incubator, which is location agnostic currently but will be relying heavily on the Indian workforce, aims to harness the relationships Deloitte has with Indian academia, industry, and SMEs.

It has been conceptualised within a hub-and-spokes model, wherein the main incubator hub will be located in India, with spokes-branches in countries like the US, Australia, etc. Thus, if a client in one of the spokes nations conceptualises a certain business use case, the incubator hub in India will help it not only develop the technological solutions but also help formulate a business model, understand its business implications, conduct early-stage testing.

"The hub will include data scientists, AI engineers, Python programmers, as well as our own sector experts in a cross-functional team that will have the business understanding, sector insights, and the technical know-how to ultimately develop a POC for our clients," Kumar explained.

"It's not just about the scale of talent you can access; you also need to have a certain degree of proximity with the R&D and engineering teams that are working in the space. The likes of AWS, Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft have got large teams in India, and hence we have the proximity to the work they do," he added.

At present, Deloitte has active global engagements in the areas of drug discovery, customer experience, content generation, and personal avatars.

Deloitte has also already entered a working arrangement with several academic institutions, including IIT Roorkee. "The incubator, since it is trying to solve business issues, leveraging generative AI, will require academic institutions such as IIT Roorkee to add their research capabilities to the project," said Kumar, adding that the involvement of higher education institutes can be related to technical infrastructure as well as business and management strategies.

Deloitte, however, will not be immediately onboarding start-ups onto their incubation centre. At this stage, the projects will primarily be overseen by Deloitte's own experts in alliance with the likes of AWS, Google, et cetera, as well as members of Indian academia.