At the 4th edition of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence – The AI India Show 2025 in Delhi, CII-Protiviti Report titled, “AI Trends and Future Impact: Industry Adoption & Insights”, was launched. At the occasion, Mr. Dhrubabrata Ghosh Dastidar, Managing Director, Protiviti Member Firm for India in an interview with Vishal kashyap, Managing Editor, Aviation World discussed on the various aspects of Artificial Intelligence and how is playing a pivotal role in transforming the aviation & aerospace sector at large. Excerpts:
What are the sectors that Protiviti caters to ?
We at Protiviti are predominantly into the services side. We would use all the products which are there in the market which brings in technological interventions to deliver our services. We are also into providing professional services and implementation for our clients into various sectors and aviation & aerospace is one of our key work areas.
What exactly Protiviti does into this particular segment?
In aviation sector, our major area of work is airport and the airport related services along with commercial and charter flights. Globally, we offer them solutions to their business problems in regard to technology, digital perspective etc.
AI is transforming the scenario of aviation sector on full scale basis. How do you see Protiviti as one of the valued contributor from a larger perspective?
Let’s look at what is driving and what are the major AI interventions that these organizations will look for in Aviation or aerospace at large. The sector is customer driven and for better experience role of AI is very significant. In recent times, at many Indian airports, Digi Yatra has transformed the airport experience where the system recognises a passenger through its face and helps through a faster check-in process. The same facial recognition can be used across the entire airport, through the entire sector and it can help and personalise and tell what is it that something that you would need through your journey.
The second comes, let’s say again if you are in an airport and there are large numbers of cameras which are capturing and trying to do a footfall analysis. The concept is to identify how many people are there in different parts of the airport and how they can leverage the ground forces which are there to provide better experience again back to them for convenience.
The other aspect where AI plays a huge role is into Predictive Maintenance. In Aviation, it can help in demand planning, forecasting and pricing for the airline. It works as an interface between the customers who tries to book tickets through online platforms and make the journey interactive.
Then, we have Generative AI which also plays a huge role in public interaction. Today, these Large Language Models (LLMs), chat bots tries to answer the queries and engage while doing any bookings. So, these are the segments where Protiviti can contribute in a bigger way.
Is there any plan to venture into the UAV segment as well?
UAV as a sector or as an industry needs a little bit more penetration from our side. If you look into the used cases, definitely it’s moving from just UAVs to AUAVs. In UAVs, till date there are people manning those UAVs from their booths or from any particular places but the AUAVs will be more autonomous in nature. They will try to take the decisions as they go on. The future will be more of edge AI, Agentic AI that would be coming into the whole picture and for further it will be not just UAVs but the UGVs as well. From defence perspective, it’s not just the air vehicles, even the ground vehicles is something that one would be focusing upon as well. So that’s another area which is gaining traction and we are hoping to do more in that segment.
How are you empowering your team with so advancement of technology?
If you look at AI, there are three aspects to it. The first is the different kind of used cases which needs to be built for any particular sector. That’s predominantly a more business-focused AI drive that needs to be there which requires a different skill set.
The second one is as there are multitudes of products into AI where some focuses upon visual analytics, or on image analytics, likewise. There are AIs which are working back with the products which exist in the market and it requires a different set of people who understands that business and its problem.
The third set is for creating these models which requires people who have a very specific data engineering background. These talents can help kind of crunch that data and create those models. So, we are also focusing on getting such people and train them to create those models in-house.
But again, just creating these models is one part of it. To work back with the product companies requires a separate skill set, separate set of people and thinking of these used cases which we have mentioned in our report where 74 per cent of the people use AI to increase operational efficiency.
How much is the accuracy quotient of AI in its operations?
At present there are four broad classifications of AI; Predictive AI, Generative AI, Agentic AI and the Edge AI. Among all of these, Edge AI is very accurate as it works on the last mile. So, this AI needs to be 100 per cent accurate or even 99.99 per cent accurate to ensure that there is nothing which is going wrong. The predictive AI is often utilises stochastic model which is going to give 100 per cent accurate results. However, the acceptable accuracy for them is in the tune of 90 to 95 per cent and even at times 87 to 90 per cent accuracy level is also considered correct. In case of Generative AIs, if you remember the GPT-3s, or even the previous generations of these generative AI responses, there were a lot of hallucinations. But the accuracy of these responses has increased to the tune of 95 to 97 per cent.
What are challenges that you see in this segment?
The major challenge would be the ethical and the responsible use of AI. The journey of AI started with narrow AI, and then it will become generic AI, and now towards the super AI. As of now, we are still in narrow AI segment and we will continue to be in the same for some more time. As we progress towards making it autonomous and it takes a decision which is incorrect than here is where the ethical and the responsible use of AI starts coming in. The ethical use will determine how AI becomes more and more acceptable to the people.
The other challenge is the security. Everywhere so much amount of data is taken and how can one ensure that the security of the data is maintained is a real challenge. And the third is the Lineage, like how to trust the data that is being used. There is always a chance of breach of data or cyber security threat towards it. AI is also playing a role in cyber security where it is trying to monitor what can be the cyber attacks and what can be the responses to those.
How big is the scalability of AI into basically aviation?
It’s limitless! Let’s look at our airport as how many people are passing through it daily. So, how can airport management monitor that it is decongested and the passengers are looked after well. That’s an area where AI can play a huge role. Today, self check-in kiosk, Digi yatra, automated bag drop are few segments which uses AI for passenger facilitation at airports. For ex, Dubai Airports started with the concept of e-gates at immigration where you can go through a green channel and don’t have to stop and go through the entire facial check.
What’s the size of this market and what is the growth projection?
There is a huge scope of AI in India and now people are working on this area and scaling it up. It is in our imagination, how more and more used cases we bring to the table and how we can scale up the infrastructure to give everybody the right set of output.
Recently, Protiviti did a CII-AI Trends Survey and also published a report, which captures what are the different areas or the used cases even within aviation and aerospace that people are focusing upon. If you know Moore’s Law, it says every 18 months our productivity doubles because the size of the chip goes down to half. With AI, it is going to be every 6 months. So, AI is going to stay and it is going to penetrate each and every industry.
