The Tamil Nadu government has asked the Union government to set up a centre of excellence for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Tamil Nadu, said Minister for Information Technology Palanivel Thiaga Rajan in Coimbatore on Friday (October 10, 2025).
Speaking at the Global Startup Summit, he said the State government wants to adopt AI to improve the functioning of the government, and it started talking to different departments. It then identified a set of services that can be automated using AI.
“We want to have an AI open data platform that we will give to startups that can come up with models,” he said. The Information Technology Department has come out with four tools and is working on 26 more, and there are some models that will be used with the existing tools. For instance, through e-parvai app, AI is used to screen patients for cataract. Similarly, AI is used in the Uzhavan app to validate crop data entry.
The Department plans to release WhatsApp-based governance to supplement the services of the e-seva centres, and ultimately it will become chatbot-based.
The State government has a little more than 500 subsidy schemes and there is good data for 370 of these. “We want to use good data and better approach and better models and automation. When we start doing these, the next step is to improve citizen and government interface,” he said, speaking about how the IT Department is using AI to provide better services to the public.
Published – October 10, 2025 04:01 pm IST