From Investment to Impact: Building a Digitally Inclusive and AI-Ready Organisation

 

Vivekananda Naskar
Director IT - Protegrity

 

Getting the most out of technology investments requires more than budget and tools, it demands clarity of purpose. Organizations must ensure IT spending drives real outcomes, every individual understands their stake in data privacy, and AI is embraced as an opportunity rather than feared as a threat.

 

IT Investments Must Drive Revenue Growth and Cost Optimization 
There are few areas where we need to focus to maximize the investments in IT space. The investment should be linked to revenue growth, cost optimization with a focus on operational expenditure when we move to cloud thinking that it will reduce expenses.

At the same time, we need to minimize or mitigate the risk. Because any breach can cost us a huge loss. We should also focus on unused licenses and services. Using FinOps efficiently can make a significant difference in achieving the ROI benefit.

 

Recognizing Every Individual's Stake in Data Privacy
Data Privacy is something where each one of us have a stake, even if someone is not directly related to the digital activity. We need to ensure that people around us understand the need for data privacy.

When every individual will understand it, we will be able to implement Data Privacy successfully across the organisation, across the country and globe. Digital inclusion should not be viewed as a privilege rather it must be viewed as a necessity. Even a person with lack of literacy must be digitally included. Ensuring that every citizen is digitally included must be a core objective of the Government.

 

Building AI Roles, Not Just AI Skills
First and foremost, objective should be to make employees understand the benefit and applicability of AI in our daily life and work. While the initial knee-jerk reaction is that AI will take out a lot of jobs, we need to make people understand that every new technology comes with a huge opportunity if we can keep our mind open to embrace the new tech and start learning it to apply in our day-to-day life. Let us make people around us aware of what AI can do and what it cannot.

This will minimise the misconception about biasness, hallucination and job security. In the organization, we should not just build skills on AI,
we should build roles that helps the organisation and the society to adopt AI effectively, efficiently and most importantly "Responsibly".