Google Cloud to help farmers reap benefits of ONDC, power super app for citizen’s services

As part of Google For India, the Google Cloud also announced it is working with Axis My India to “democratise information on citizens services” with a super app call the ‘A App’ that uses Google Cloud’s scalable and secure infrastructure.

To help farmers benefit from ONDC, Google Cloud will be partnering with Sign Catch to help Farmers Producers Organisations (FPOs) build catalogues and reach out to merchants across the country. Farmers across the country will be able to use the power of Google Cloud’s generative AI and language capabilities with just a few clicks and for the first time gain the ability to transact at scale, Managing Director Bikram Singh Bedi told indianexpress.com.

As part of Google For India, Google Cloud also announced it is working with Axis My India to “democratise information on citizens services” with a super app called the ‘A App’ that uses Google Cloud’s scalable and secure infrastructure. “We are looking to impact over 250 million Indian households which really translates to impacting the lives of over a billion Indians and making sure they are able to have easier lives,” Bedi said, underlining how this signals India moving forward as a society. “Generative AI technology is now capable of two-way communication in 13 Indian languages, and will be a crucial bridge between the government and the corporate social services as well as citizens”.

One of the use cases of the app will be to show Ayushmann Bharat Hospital near a certain user. It will also curate information for similar queries users might have.

The company is also partnering with Bhashini and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to use generative AI and language models to make government services more “language responsive”. Bedi said Google Cloud is launching a centre of excellence on generative AI and language. Bhashini teams will essentially leverage Google Cloud Generative AI’s secure data architectures, Gen AI app-building tools and our foundation models to essentially build responsible generative AI models that are trained on Government of India datasets, and Bhashini’s language translation technology.

“This will really accelerate the adoption and development of citizen-centric services in Indic languages and will speed the development of homegrown Gen AI technologies”. As a part of this initiative, Bedi said, Google Cloud will also be looking to “equip more than 1 million professionals and students with Gen AI knowledge and skills”.

Bedi explained that most of these new services will be powered by Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise offering. “In the enterprise space, there are a few things that you need to be mindful of as a business. The first thing my data is my data, which essentially means that my data should be used to create models and then that model should be with me only. It can’t be a model that my competition is also using.” Bedi said that this model cannot hallucinate like consumer-facing generative AI offerings and all results need to be authenticated.

“Now security is a big factor. How do you ensure that your app is as secure as any? Cost is also a big factor. You know, models come in all sizes. How do you ensure that you’re using the right model for the right use case? You don’t want to be using a 750,000 billion parameter model for what could actually be done by a 30,000 model,” Bedi said, adding how Vertex is a platform that helps you with all of these aspects.

In September, Bedi said, Google Cloud also inked a partnership with Cert-in to “significantly ramp up India’s cybersecurity training and skilling”. As part of this partnership, Google will train 1,000 government officials in cyber defence best practices, including using generative AI and conducting cyber security rounds led by experts. It will also provide 100,000 scholarships for Google cybersecurity certification to be taught by experts at Google.