Why some industries are fearful of AI, and why some are excited

Endava head of Google Cloud busts some myths about the popular technology.

As AI continues to grow in adaption, some sectors and regions are still fearful of the technology while others are investing more time and energy into AI.

Saurabh Bajaj, head of Google Cloud at Endava Australia told CRN Australia exclusively on which regions are embracing AI.

He said in Asia there is a lot of fear around technology, he said there are many questions around who owns and controls the data.

"Who's going to own this? Is our corporate PII data going to be everywhere. Reality is the answer is, no, you can control those things,” he said.

Closer to home in Australia, the fear wavers, depending on the sector, Bajaj explained.

“There are still segments of the market which have that fear from leveraging, but there is bubbling that is continuously happening from the ground up to say, ‘No, it's okay’,” he said.

“We can use Gemini to be able to just answer simple questions. Let's start there, and then start making the move towards something more agentic.”

Bajaj breaks down which sectors are open to AI and the others that are reticent.

“Insurance, that’s for sure. Banking, surprisingly, is not,” he said.

“The life sciences and the healthcare industry is also a bit more resistive, and that's purely because of the type of data that they have, it's not very much in any other way.”

He noted the interesting stance mining and energy sectors have around AI.

“The thoughts are, do we have our data correctly? What will they know about our competitive advantage on this site?” He said.

“It's just about, how do you take them through the education around things are okay, we can make things better. Then even look at, by doing something like this, are you operating more sustainably? Are you able to hit those ESG goals that you've set as well?”

Mythbusting agentic AI

Bajaj works deep in the agentic AI space and explained one of the first myths he wants to bust is that it is hard.

“People have that, ‘oh, my goodness, I'm going to lose my job out of this’ No, that's a myth busted.”

Another is that building agents is hard.

“If I'm doing all of this heavy lifting in marketing to be able to build that marketing campaign, I can't give that to an AI or multiple AIs to do that. Reality is, it's not hard today,” Bajaj said.

“Google's giving us the technology to do that, and they're abstracting it so that I don't need to know how to code. I can just get on with figuring out that customer segment that is going to be the best to buy my product, or test this against this segment, and go build that pipeline.”

The hard bit, he recognised is making the decision on the quality of the agent.

“Making the decision on is this as good as what you would have done yourself? It's very much myth busted. It's not hard. You can build something super quickly, and you should be prototyping things continuously,” he said.

Another myth is not having the proper governance in place.

“Governance teams are being worried about this is now going to not have proper governance,” he said.

“People are going to across the organisation, are going to have access to lots of different types of data they shouldn't. That's simple foundations that has been proven to be absolutely fine,” he ended.