A colloquium was held on 10th January, 2025 on the topic “How can AI empower health practitioners, providers and communities?” that was led by Vivek Seshadri, Principal Researcher at Microsoft and Co-founder – Karya Inc. While using different examples, Vivek discussed the kinds of AI that are most useful to the work and research areas of different non-profits i.e. Language-based AI tasks. He also traced the evolution of AI in the last decade, and highlighted its rapid development and areas of concern when it comes to complexity and ethics.

Following the brief presentation was a discussion on the deployment of AI in three different case studies, including that of Karya’s collaboration with KHPT for TB that is currently a standard Q&A bot, that seeks to be upgraded into a conversational bot.

The colloquium concluded on a note where there was an understanding that AI needs to be employed to ‘solve’ for our problems. Therefore, we need to identify the problems accurately, think of scale and innovations and deploy it to address those problems specifically. The efficiency, use and possibilities of AI are valuable and inevitable, and therefore cannot be ignored, anymore.