Mohali: On the occasion of the National Technology Day today, startups of the region have made an earnest demand to make Mohali a Cloud and AI(Artificial Intelligence) hub.
Navdeep Gill, Founder and CEO, XenonStack, said, “Mohali has many prestigious national level educational institutions and also has the required infrastructure. The region produces around 50,000 technical graduates every year. Lot of startups are already delivering services around cloud, dataops, devops and AI here. In such a scenario, the state government should create an ecosystem with the right stakeholders to develop Mohali as a hub of Cloud and AI.”
Experts opine that there are certain factors that seem to be pointing towards establishment of the tricity particularly Mohali as an analytics and AI hub of the north region. In this light, Ravi Garg, CEO , Master Software Solutions said, “Last year, the Punjab government gave seed funding to four startups. The government is now supporting various initiatives to promote entrepreneurship and investment in Punjab, from infrastructure development to setting up knowledge hubs like ISB, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, etc. The initiative needs to be aggressively taken ahead.”
It is noteworthy that by 2023, 50% of all business workloads are expected to run in the cloud, and Covid-19 accelerated the cloud adoption. As of now, over 60% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. McKinsey estimates that AI techniques have the potential to create between $3.5 T and $5.8 T in value annually across nine business functions in 19 industries. In keeping with this huge demand, Mohali and tricity based startups are demanding that the Punjab government focus on making Mohali an Information Technology centre.
Sunil Garg, Co- Founder of www.trakop.com says that AI has been used in industries to automate industrial procedures, avoid human errors, and discover unexplored places. All the industries, especially healthcare, banking, manufacturing, agriculture, and pharma, will depend heavily on AI, security and data analytics. ‘Invest Punjab’ is also an excellent portal for IT Companies requiring several clearances to establish a business in Punjab. This is encouraging many companies to set up bases in Mohali.
National Technology Day plays a significant role as, on this day, the Technology Development Board (TDB) organises national awards for the commercialisation of technologies under the categories like National Awards, MSME awards, and Startup awards. This kind of award takes place to honour various industries and their role in the successful commercialisation of innovative indigenous technology.