With Artificial Intelligence set to make inroads into the way business is done, India’s IT industry and others feel that employee upskilling in AI usage will be crucial to employment in coming years and the nature of the jobs on offer while volume of hiring can reduce.
IT industry leaders such as Infosys, KPIT Technologies, and Yotta Data Services talked about how AI will impact the job market in coming years.
As the AI boom marches on, different IT companies have different take on how AI is going to impact jobs.
Major companies like Capgemini, Wipro and Infosys told businessline that AI will not reduce jobs in the market, provided employees are able to use AI applications satisfactorily.
“Jobs will change not reduce. What I spend my time on today will be different from what I spend my time on tomorrow. That will be the big shift. If people don’t upskill themselves, go up the value chain, they will lose their jobs. Particularly, call centres need to think about how they can add value to their work. AI can deal with tier-1 calls but people can still work on the next two tiers of customer calls,” said Sanjeev Jain, Chief Operating Officer at Wipro.
No AI attrition link
Ashwin Yardi, CEO of Capgemini, said there is no correlation between AI and the attrition rate. Instead, he said the technology has at times helped predict the attrition at certain times.
“We have not seen any correlation between AI and attrition. We see there is lot more opportunity for people to learn new skills, they see an opportunity to use it in their work. So, at this point we do not see a correlation between AI and attrition; in fact, we can use AI to predict iteration better, but that is very rare,” Yardi said.
Hiring to slow down
Mohit Kochar, Head of Global Marketing, Branding and Corporate Communications at KPIT Technologies, said he expects hiring to slow in the next few years.
“If you don’t use AI, you’ll become irrelevant. Whoever embraces and augments tech will not lose their job. The number of people to hire will become fewer because existing workforce in the next few years will become much more productive. We are already seeing a de-linking of headcount with revenue in the IT industry,” said Kochar, referring to the recent trend where despite growth in revenue, headcount remained low.
According to Neelkanth Mishra, economist at Axis Bank, “We have to reskill, find solutions, be agile but I think this is a big opportunity to increase jobs. The first cut impact initially will be that people stop hiring to assess how much work can be done by machines. However, as the cost of software development and business services starts to fall, the market will start expanding. So in the coming 3-5 years, I would expect that this will in fact create jobs in technology.”
Jobs not to increase
However, Sunil Gupta, Co-Founder, MD and CEO of Yotta Data Services, remained sceptical of jobs increasing in the AI age.
“More jobs will be lost compared to the number of jobs created. Those who are not able to adapt to AI will lose jobs. That is where I think the economic disparity will increase further. People who have money, are well-educated, they will get to keep their jobs. But the people who from are the lower rung of society, their jobs will be lost.
“All the so-called softer parts of life will be infected by technology. AI will be far widespread than any other technology. Why is that music companies, companies, media agencies, are suing AI companies? The underlying problem is that once AI starts doing my work, what can I do?” said Gupta.