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The stage was set for YourStory’s first-ever developers’ conference, DevSparks 2024, on Saturday, May 4, where over 1,000 developers, technologists, enterprise leaders, tech entrepreneurs, industry experts, and tech enthusiasts, had come together—all under one roof—to set the ball rolling and build India’s tech future. 

The day-long conference also served as a platform for developers to showcase their latest and most relevant innovations to potential employers and investors, and the who’s who of India’s tech ecosystem graced the event to share their insightful ideas.

During the inaugural session, Surojit Chatterjee, Founder and CEO of Ema, addressed a packed auditorium through a video call from the US and said by 2030, AI is expected to be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, bringing big changes to wealth creation and society.

Chatterjee said that if enterprises were further automated, the opportunity for wealth creation would be in the order of $1 trillion to $10 trillion. He added, “We should be seeing billion-dollar valuation companies with less than 100 employees with the opportunity presented by Gen AI.”

He also emphasised the challenges of building AI software saying, “AI has to be responsible, making sure there are no biases or misinformation.” 

Next, Todd Greene, Co-founder and CEO of PubNub, focused on spotting developer opportunities in AI and real-time tech for hypergrowth.

He said, “India ranks as the 10th most affordable country for internet access. India’s population surpasses the combined populations of the nine countries by almost threefold. This makes it an excellent choice for businesses centred around large-scale interactions.”

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Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder, Ola, Ola Electric and Krutrim

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Next, the Indian startup ecosystem’s ‘poster boy’ Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder of Ola, Ola Electric, and Krutrim, geared up to get into a conversation about empowering developers for India’s AI-first future. 

The audience roared as Aggarwal said, “In the last 30 years, the centre of gravity for data was created in the US and now they are coming to India for demand. India is not just an open market, it is the creators of paradigms for the future.” 

He added that Indian developers are in dire need of an Indian platform to truly shine and build products for not just India but for the world. “This is Krutrim’s mission. We want to grow with the developer ecosystem in India,” the serial entrepreneur said. 

Aggarwal also unveiled Krutrim’s early stack at DevSparks, launching its Android app. “We have built our own cloud infra to train our own models,” the founder said. The senior leadership and AI experts from Krutrim also unveiled new products and advancements in the field of Indian AI at DevSparks 2024. 

Late in the afternoon, Pramod Varma, Chief Architect of Aadhaar and India Stack, and the present Co-founder of FIDE, discussed how to empower developers to build India-specific solutions using Indian technologies. 

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Pramod Varma, Chief Architect of Aadhaar and India Stack

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“India has shown to the rest of the world that we can continue to build digital open infrastructure on top of which private innovation can thrive…India has shown to the world that we can create public rails on which private innovation can thrive for economic development and is inclusive in nature,” Varma said. 

A panel of experts—Dale Vaz (CEO, Aaritya), Mukesh Jain (CTP, VP, and Global Head of People Analytics, Capgemini), Malavika Natu (Head SI Partner Sales Engineering Leader, Snowflake), Puneet Vyas (Managing Director, UBS)—discussed how AI can supercharge developer workflows. 

Meanwhile, Rohan Verma, CEO and ED, MapmyIndia, talked about the art and science of building disruptive technology and enabling APIs. 

In another insightful talk, Seema Ramachandra, Head of Customer Engineering (Retail, CPG, and Health) at Google Cloud India, revealed how Google’s AI model Gemini can supercharge the development process. 

DevSparks 2024 also hosted a bunch of workshops and masterclasses to help the attendees learn from real-life experiences and get to the core of facilitating tech enablement in India. Bruno Goveans, Director (Cloud Computing, India), Akamai, conducted a workshop on ‘Unlocking the power of cloud-agnostic architecture.’ 

Prashanth Subrahmanyam, Manager (Developer Advocacy) at Google Cloud, took a masterclass on discovering and deploying open and third-party models on Vertex AI. 

In a power-packed panel, Vimal Kumar (Founder of Juspay) and Ram Kunchur (Head of Product Innovation, Digi Yatra Foundation), discussed the power of app development to drive impactful change in India.

Finally, at DevSparks 2024, YourStory, in association with 100x Engineers, announced the winners of the Gen AI Buildathon 2024—an online hackathon to revolutionise how we solve real-world problems using AI.

The winners under the AI filmmaking category were 3 Musketeers, who produced a horror short film, using AI; and under the LLM and Diffusion category, team Entropy bagged the winner’s title, along with Rs 25,000 cash prize, presented by Ola Krutrim. 

Besides the impactful sessions and interactive masterclasses, DevSparks 2024 provided a platform for techies and enthusiasts to network with organisations, including Google, Wells Fargo, Salesforce, Walmart, Accenture, WeWork, KreditBee, Dell, JioSaavn, Zeta, Visa, KPMG, and Robert Bosch, among others. 

Check out all that happened at DevSparks 2024 here.