I Don't See Any Other Trend Competing With AI: Nitish Jain While Jain is devoted to change lives, he believes that technology has a major role to play in the whole education sector and Generative AI is going to disrupt education in a very big and serious manner.

India has a large demographic dividend in the age bracket of five to 24 years with 580 million people, presenting a huge opportunity in the education sector, according to India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). The country holds an important place in the global education industry with largest networks of higher education institution in the world.

With increasing awareness, private Indian players are collaborating with international brands to provide an international standard of education. Recently SP Jain Group announced its acquisition of California Miramar University (CMU) and marked its strategic expansion into the United States.

Speaking with Entrepreneur India, Nitish Jain, president of SP Jain School of Global Management said that he found the education sector extremely interesting and it gave him the ability to change lives through proper high quality education.

Jain took the inspiration from his father who was well versed with many of the educational institutions he had founded because of philanthropy. "One of institutions that he founded was a business school in Mumbai, to which I used to visit just to see how they work. And I became very friendly with the then Dean. I learned ropes of education and I was just sucked in after that. I was just so interested because you can change lives," he said.

"Education is that one industry that you can actually change lives of other humans. It was very appealing to me that through relevant and high quality education, you can actually change, not one, two, but hundreds of lives," he added.

"We bought CMU to extend the delivery of campuses. We know that US is a number one destination for international students and in the US we think that the Silicon Valley, where the new campus of CMU has been set up is very desirable. So students can go and spend a term there or students can graduate with the US degree. It's up to them. I think it is very prestigious new initiative by the school to include the US in its portfolio of campuses," he said.

He further said that the second reason is CMU is going to focus on AI we believe that AI is definitely the future. It's right in the heart of the valley where all the companies around them are inventing AI and therefore we could definitely connect with these companies.

While Jain is devoted to change lives, he believes that technology has a major role to play in the whole education sector and Generative AI is going to disrupt education in a very big and serious manner.

Emphasizing on this emerging technology, he said, "Gen AI is very much a game changer. Nobody could have imagined even 12 to 18 months ago how powerful Gen AI can be. We are one of the early movers in adopting Gen AI. We've already created an AI tutor which is an on-call tutor that can really help students. I think it'll only grow in usage over the years. Gen AI is going to disrupt education in a very big and serious manner."

As per the IBEF, with cutting-edge technologies such as AI, ML, IoT and blockchain, India's education sector will redefine itself in the years to come.

When talk about the technology in education, there is always a concern about its integrity with academics and Jain believes that there are several ways in which one can address academic integrity.

"There is a concern that it will stop creativity of students, but actually it makes students even more creative because a lot of the writing formatting can be done by Gen AI. So you can spend all your time on being creative, analytical. And I think Gen AI would definitely be a very powerful tool to students to do this. And how you can prevent them from just blindly plagiarizing or, there are many ways in which we do it, and therefore it's no longer a concern," he said.

Speaking about the best practices that integrate AI into the academy without losing sense of education, he said that SP Jain has to focus to be a leader in AI. "I don't think in the near future any major trend. I think AI is just too big a trend. I don't see any other trend which would compete with AI," he added.

On cultural front, SP Jain Global School of Management has students from over 20 countries and when they go for an exchange, they learn about the culture of the other countries, and in turn, the other country learns about India and Indian students.

"These sort of exchanges surely helps everyone to understand the other person, because the way we speak, the way we dress, the way we communicate, could be different and therefore it's a very useful thing for these exchanges, and we totally encourage exchanges," he added.