AI can help India leapfrog without building its own models: Rubrik executive

Washington: Artificial intelligence can help India emerge as a global leader in the next phase of technological innovation even without developing frontier AI models of its own, according to Dev Rishi, General Manager for AI at Rubrik, who believes the biggest challenge facing enterprises today is not AI capability but governance, security and compliance.

Speaking to IANS ahead of Rubrik’s annual Forward conference in Las Vegas, where the company is unveiling a series of AI-focused cyber resilience products, Rishi said organisations around the world are still in the “very early innings” of AI adoption.

“I actually think we’re in the very early innings of AI changing world,” Rishi said. “The first generation of AI were these LLM models that were mostly informational.”

According to him, the next phase will be driven by AI systems that can perform tasks and take actions inside organisations.

“I generally think about that shift as a shift from like generative AI to adjunct AI,” he said. “That is the way that it’s going to start to actually lead to a lot of ROI inside organisations.”

Rubrik, a cyber resilience company, announced a new set of AI products designed to help enterprises recover more quickly from cyber attacks and securely govern AI agents operating inside organisations. The company is also launching integrations for Anthropic’s Claude AI ecosystem and introducing agent-driven recovery capabilities.

Rishi said AI adoption among large enterprises is increasingly being held back by concerns over governance and security rather than technology limitations.

“If you survey enterprise CIOs and CISOs, they’ll tell you that the number one blocker towards being able to adopt AI is governance and guardrails and compliance,” he said.

“It’s actually not cost, it’s not orchestration, it’s not even quality.”

The executive argued that securing AI systems will require AI itself.

“In order to be able to use AI, you need to use AI itself to secure and govern those agents,” he said.

On the global AI race, Rishi offered a different perspective from the increasingly competitive narrative between the United States and China.

“My personal point of view on it is that I think that AI is going to be a technology that becomes more ubiquitous across the world,” he said.

“I actually think like a lot of other technologies, the benefits are going to compound over time.”

Asked where India fits into the evolving AI landscape, Rishi said the country possesses strong advantages through its technology talent and education ecosystem.

“India has an incredibly rich tech sector and a really strong education system that positions it well to be at kind of the forefront for what AI is doing,” he said.

While noting that India has not had the same level of foundation model development as the United States or China, he argued that this does not prevent leadership in AI.

“I don’t think that’s a core requirement to be a leader in AI,” he said.

Instead, he sees India playing a major role in building applications and business tools around AI. “India actually playing a role is going to be helping on essentially build some of the harnesses and context and verticalised applications around AI that help organisations get ROI from it a lot more quickly,” he said.

Rishi, who was born in India and holds an Overseas Citizen of India card, also said governments could benefit significantly from AI in document review, information synthesis and approval workflows.

“I think AI can help significantly there,” he said, pointing to areas where public agencies face large backlogs of paperwork and administrative reviews.

Despite growing concerns about AI risks, Rishi dismissed suggestions that the technology is overhyped.

“I think like a lot of other technologies, what we’ll see is that it’s maybe slightly gets a lot of buzz in the short term,” he said. “But in the long term we actually find that it’s underhyped.”

Comparing AI’s trajectory to the internet, he added: “I think AI is going to be on a very similar scale.”

The rapid rise of generative AI since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 has triggered a global race among governments and technology companies to develop advanced models and AI-powered services. India has also expanded efforts to build domestic AI capabilities while encouraging wider adoption of AI across public services, education, healthcare and industry.