New Delhi, Dec 14 (IANS): India is at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI) surge and the next year will see more local innovations from the country with broader adoptions across various sectors globally, a top IBM executive said on Friday.

According to Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research-India and Singapore, 2018 has been an exciting year for IBM Research India lab with some path-breaking work coming out of it.

"The team's contribution in the area of trusted AI is now part of IBM AI Open Scale and continues to be the focus for IBM research globally and in India," Raghavan said in a statement.

"Further, for next year, our collaboration with IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay will help us advance the work in the area of casual reasoning and trusted AI and further contribute in making AI system get trained with key traits like reasoning, comprehension and transparency," added Raghavan, also the CTO, IBM India/South Asia.

IBM on Friday released a 2018 retrospective on AI, stressing that the technology has moved beyond the nascent stage.

According to Dr Dario Gil, COO of IBM Research, they are keeping an eye on three trends in AI for 2019.

First is human intuition that helps us understand cause/effect presents an enormous obstacle to machines.

"We'll see improvements in 'causal modelling' techniques that will push AI from asking 'what happened' to asking 'what would happen, based on possible actions," Dr Gil wrote in a blog post.

Secondly, trust and transparency will continue to drive the AI-conversation.

"Thirdly, we'll see increased research into how quantum computing may help scale AI models -- a key area of exploration as we continue to drive toward real-world use cases for quantum," he noted.

While "general AI" can truly think, learn, and reason like a human, "broad AI" can learn more generally and work across different disciplines.

"IBM Research is driving this evolution. We have been a pioneer of AI since the inception of the field, and we continue to expand its frontiers through our portfolio of research focused on three areas: Advancing AI, Scaling AI, and Trusting AI," said the company.