The doomsday scenario that people paint about AI will never happen-Ramanan Ramakrishna, Fujitsu

The recently held Fujitsu Forum in Munich Germany witnessed participation of more than 12,000 delegates. The theme this year was Human Centric Innovation: Digital co-creation, which showcased how digital co-creation was driving business transformation by blending customers’ business expertise with innovative technology to create new value.

On the sidelines of the conference, Businessworld spoke to Ramanan Ramakrishna, Head of Service Innovation and Portfolio at Fujitsu EMEIA about the fast paced digital disruption and how Fujitsu has embraced the change.

Speaking about the disruption in IT space, Ramakrishna said, “The first thing I would like to mention is that the pace of disruption is significantly changing. If you look at the industry, the speed at which the things were changing were fairly in a controllable manner. The big thing we are seeing now after talking to analysts and customers is that the pace at which the things are changing is far more than before.”

Ramakrishna also said that some of the rules which used to apply in the past when any new trend was spotted are no more valid in contemporary times. “At Fujitsu, how we look at these trends is that we have a set of researchers who are looking at what is happening today and what is up and coming and its applicability to mainstream. For example, everybody talks about blockchain today and it is truly a disruptive technology, so we look at its applicability into enterprise solution, our enterprise and our customers. I think there is no point in just flaunting technology and implementing it just for the sake of it. We are big on standard offerings and we want to build something standard and use it across industry”.

Sharing his thoughts about the focus areas for Fujitsu, Ramakrishna added that it varied across the globe, depending on the region they operate in.

“It varies across the globe what we focus on. But lot of what we do is to look at something that is cross industry, as the line between industries is starting to blur significantly. We are pretty much dealing with all industries in different manners for example retail is huge for us.”

As the Head of Service Innovation and Portfolio at Fujitsu EMEIA, one of the biggest challenges according to Ramakrishna has been the security issue. Sharing how security has become one of the biggest focus areas for Fujitsu, he said, “Security has always been there and people have dealt with it as just another operational activity. In fact for everything that we are trying to secure there is a big industry out there to hack into this. What it has does is that organizations who used to look at security as an operational activity are now bringing security into the forefront. Traditionally Fujitsu has been into highly secure industries and when you try to protect them you are in turn protecting their customers and everyone else in the value chain. We have decided to bring out this focus on security explicitly and it is a big focus area for us.”

The debate around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data was another key highlight at the Fujitsu Forum in Munich this year. Experts debated the future of AI and how it would add value and amplify the human element.

Commenting on the use of Big Data and AI and how Fujitsu was using them to provide effective enterprise solutions, Ramakrishna said, “AI Is what you see, behind AI is the ability to crunch petabytes and gigabytes of data and at a speed with which you can actually make some decisions which are meaningful. However, will AI get as good as humans? It will ultimately. I think AI will ultimately assist humans with things which they cannot do. For example humans’ cannot look at petabytes of data and make sense of it. AI will help in industries which are mundane so to say. AI is a huge value add and we have to adopt it and embrace it. At the same time the doomsday scenario that people paint about AI will never happen.”