Given the progress in the digital payments space, post-demonetisation, it comes as no surprise that financial technology is seeing keenly contested one-upmanship in the realm of data, AI and machine learning.

Madhusudan Shekar, head of Digital Innovation (India) for Amazon Internet Services, in an exclusive chat with CNBC-TV18, said that fin-tech along with media and sports are the big drivers for the company in the AI and machine-learning space.

“HDFC Life, for instance is building a data platform called Atom, through which it generates information about a potential customer base and generates deep insights,” said Shekar. “This in turn allows them to provide life-insurance policies across its customers.” Not to be outdone, Policy Bazaar's 'PB Connect' connects with an Amazon AI offering, which allows the company to automatically notify a customer of errors in documentation, for an insurance policy.

But it isn’t just FinTech...

The company says there’s a lot more patronage outside the FinTech space too. “Ixigo, in the travel space, has built all necessary optimisation and machine-learning models, and is in a position to reduce cost of their operations and travel services,” said Shekar, adding, “The reduction in customer acquisition and service costs, means they can potentially provide you better offers. That’s how innovation is helping companies across the spectrum.”

This sustained patronage has Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), which is the Indian re-seller for Amazon Web Services (AWS), triple its revenues from Rs 411.1 crore in FY 17, to around Rs 1235.4 crore in FY18. This has also meant that Indian customers seem to be picking Amazon over Google and Microsoft when it comes to cloud services.

“Democratising AI”

While machine-learning and artificial intelligence may be relatively new to India, Amazon Internet Services says the pieces of the puzzle have already begun fitting in. “From data-processing, to algorithms required, to elasticity of the cloud — all of it allows you to build new AI capabilities,” said Shekar. “We at Amazon are now looking to democratize this capability —developers to take advantage of services in the space of vision, natural language processing, voice and speech, and build their systems.”

Amazon says this applies to more complex models as well. “When customers to want to build specialized models like fraud-detection or forecasting, or give these customers the ability to build their own models,” he said.

First Published:Nov 28, 2018 9:11 AM IST