India has incredible opportunity in AI-led transformation: Qualcomm CEO

AI will bring about a fundamental change, creating new devices, experiences and services, offering a 'massive opportunity', which offers India an 'incredible' chance to benefit from the transformation, Qualcomm President and Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon said on Friday.

For a country like India that leapfrogged the internet and went straight to the mobile internet, it is "going to be true again" about AI, he said while speaking at the AI Impact Summit here.

He further said in terms of the potential, as AI is going to "change everything, create new devices, new experiences, new services" that become a massive opportunity.

Pointing out opportunities for India, Amon said, "There is a process of jumping into large-scale industrialisation. India is becoming a global manufacturing hub as well. With AI, you go from the very beginning with smart manufacturing, automation with the incredible change that is happening in this sector, enabled by those technologies."  Similarly, he said that AI can play an important role in making India's smart cities continue to evolve their infrastructure, and also increasing the scale and reach of access to healthcare, while providing powerful learning tools in education.

AI can also fundamentally change a few sectors like agriculture, he added.

Stating that the potential of connecting AI with everything that is going on in India is "incredible and exciting", he said it is about meeting the ambition of democratising this technology for everyone and playing an important role in increasing global welfare.

"In the mobile ecosystem, AI is going to fundamentally change how we think about mobile devices as of today," Amon said, adding that AI is going to be one of the biggest transitions, as big as going from voice to data.

Stating that India has an incredible opportunity with this transformation, he said, "We have seen that those big shifts in technology create opportunity, change players. It changed the role of different countries as they provide a global scale for the technology, and that's an incredible opportunity for Indians."  Referring to what happened in mobile phones in India, he said, "One of the largest data consumption per user in mobile devices in the world is in India, the whole internet is mobile.