Our learnings can help India’s mission to create responsible AI: SAP’s global AI head

New Delhi, Nov 4 (IANS) As India prepares to organise its first-ever global artificial intelligence (AI) summit in December, Walter Sun, Global Head of AI at cloud software major SAP, has said that the government and other stakeholders can learn a lot from companies like SAP in terms of helping provide the information they need to make robust decisions on AI.

In a conversation with IANS, Sun who is an industry veteran with more than 18 years, said that the more informed the governments are on AI, the more enlightened decisions can be made to accelerate innovation without harming end-users.

“The more we connect with the government on building responsible AI together, the more it will also become easier for us to innovate while talking about proper regulations for the whole industry,” he noted.

“We spend a lot of time talking to customers and working on the latest technologies. So governments can learn a lot from us in terms of helping provide the information they need to make better decisions,” the SAP executive told IANS on the sidelines of the company’s flagship ‘TechEd’ conference in Bengaluru this week.

After the successful AI Safety Summit in the UK, the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) in New Delhi next month will further deliberate upon the risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI) — in the presence of world leaders — before a global framework is reached in Korea next year, according to Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and IT.

As the council chair of GPAI, India is set to host the annual summit at Pragati Maidan in Delhi from December 12-14.

Sun’s technological journey extends back to 2005, when he held pivotal roles in research and product development at Microsoft.

Notably, he was instrumental in the creation of Bing Predicts, a pioneering platform utilising anonymised and aggregated data for predictive analytics.

This innovation enabled the integration of AI features across Bing Search, Windows, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform.

Sun has a strong belief in the ability of generative AI to revolutionise various industries.

“Responsible AI is on top of the mind for SAP. I think it’s extremely important that whenever we build AI, especially generative AI which has a much larger footprint of algorithmically produced content, we keep a close eye on what we’re delivering to our customers,” Sun emphasised.

“We know that governments care so we want to partner with them. We also want to lead the way ourselves because we know AI technology. We can partner with governments to explain what we’re doing and hope that they can follow our leads,” he added.

According to him, generative AI can help businesses save money, make them more efficient and productive and also make the lives of employees better, as the realms of enterprise software and AI continue to converge.

As generative AI begins to disrupt businesses of all sizes globally and in India, Cloud solutions major SAP this week launched new AI capabilities and advancements for developers to build generative AI-based apps and solutions.

With Sun at the helm of SAP’s AI initiatives, the company is poised to usher in a new era of innovation, offering clients groundbreaking solutions to tackle their most pressing problems.

(Nishant Arora can be reached at nishant.a@ians.in)

–IANS

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