Melbourne: Cisco sees a 'phenomenal opportunity' in India and is seeing significant traction across sectors with manufacturing emerging as a key vertical, the company's vice president, networking and solutions engineering, APJC, Raymond Janse van Rensburg told ET.

"Manufacturing is a massive opportunity and we saw that in India," he said. "They (manufacturing companies) see the opportunity of running inferencing on the factory floor, in the different locations, as close as possible to the edge, because it helps them with latency. A lot of them are (also) very sensitive with regard to intellectual property, so they don't want that stuff going back into public cloud. They want to keep it local and have full control over that."

He said AI is going to drive value into different verticals with manufacturing being front and center as the use cases are myriad. Be it quality inspection, predictive maintenance, logistics, warehousing and operations and the AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) or robots moving around on the factory floor. But the opportunity is not restricted only to manufacturing.

"I see phenomenal opportunity in India," Rensburg said. "A lot of manufacturing conversations that we've got in India, but it moves way beyond that into financial services, into the transportation, airport sector, small-medium business, ITeS (Information Technology Enabled Services) community. If we look at some of the deployments, like in airports, it (India) is leading in the world."

Rensburg said India is mirroring what is happening globally. He said that two years ago, conversations with companies were more centred around mining, a little bit around connectivity, a fair amount around automated vehicles and automotive manufacturing. But that has evolved now and diversified to include the whole landscape of manufacturing.

While the opportunity for AI-enabled industry is huge, AI readiness among enterprises is still lagging. Simon Miceli, managing director of cloud and AI infrastructure, APJC at Cisco said that the bottlenecks were fairly universal across the globe. Access to capital like in America and to some extent Europe was a key hindrance. But he said there were some fundamental issues that needed to be addressed. For instance, infrastructure constraints like power and the supply of GPUs to name a few.

"That's going to continue to be a constraint for quite some time," he said. "The ability to secure AI is going to be one (other constraint). We have a trust issue with AI, a trust deficit that needs to be addressed. And that's a big one. To secure these emerging technologies, where a lot is unknown, is really difficult. And then just feeding in all the data to a point where it adds value in the life cycle of AI is a big challenge."

(The author was in Melbourne at the invitation of Cisco)