“Strong focus on the knowledge economy with technology as the bedrock for boosting socio economic growth and green development. The government’s intent to set up three centres of excellence (CoE) will encourage the ecosystem to make AI in India and make AI work for India.

Rekha M. Menon, Chairperson and Senior Managing Director at Accenture in India.

While Agriculture, Healthcare & Sustainable Cities are the current focus of CoE’s, India has multidimensional potential – AI can add an estimated $450-500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, and more than 60% will be from four key sectors – Financial Services, Consumer Packaged Goods & Retail, Healthcare, and Industrials & Automotive. India will need to continue to invest in these centers to keep pace with the evolving asks across all sectors.

Further, the unified skill India digital platform coupled with skilling in areas like robotics, coding, and other soft skills will enable industry ready talent at scale and foster greater entrepreneurship, helping India realize its demographic dividend and lead in the techade.”

Rekha M. Menon, Chairperson and Senior Managing Director at Accenture in India.

“Broadly, the Union Budget 2023 provides the right fiscal stimulus for a consumption economy and will strengthen India’s position as a bright spot in a tepid global economy. Specifically, the income tax rationalization gives the right signals to the services sector and will boost consumption.

Piyush N. Singh, Lead – Africa, India and Middle East, Accenture

The budget lays out the ground to create islands to attract international investments required for energy transition. The government’s ongoing focus on green mobility and energy transition including green hydrogen will help bring down energy dependence on fossil fuels while providing long-term economic gains for India. Setting up new centres of excellence for AI and 5G labs for developing applications will help democratize AI and push for wider adoption of 5G services. It will be important for the private sector ecosystem to work closely with government to realize the digital future of India.”

Piyush N. Singh, Lead – Africa, India and Middle East, Accenture

“The focus on improving credit access and creating digital public infrastructure for agriculture along with the existing Agri-stack (India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture ) will unlock new growth opportunities for agri-tech SMEs and entrepreneurs as well as farmers.  Access to granular data via these digital initiatives will enhance access to agri-credit for this segment and also drive new business models for banks as a result of better credit discovery and risk management.

Sonali Kulkarni, Lead – Financial Services, Accenture in India

The extension of the Digilocker facility to enterprises and MSMEs, KYC reforms, a more integrated approach towards identity management processes, and ongoing innovations to the India Stack will help banks, NBFCs, and fintechs to underwrite better and more efficiently. Even though clarity on the exact contours of the National Financial Information Registry is awaited, it seems to be a step in the right direction towards more efficient and transparent access to credit. 

Finally, the expanded credit guarantee scheme for MSMEs will be critical to continued economic growth across industries and expanding employment opportunities.”

Sonali Kulkarni, Lead – Financial Services, Accenture in India