The speed, precision and technology of machines have posed a challenge of ‘jobless growth’ and skill development of manpower resources to the emerging economies like India. However, change has always been the rule of life and the correct policies and strategies by policy makers would truly utilise the potential of AI towards human development.

Problem statement- The e-commerce giant Amazon is ready to replace the hundreds of delivery boys with the latest robots. The automation threatens 69% of the existing jobs in India and 77% of the total in China. The loss of jobs due to automation are mainly related to non-customer facing roles at the low-skill level. Approximately 1,50,000 jobs are expected to be lost related to manual testing; 2,60,000 jobs in infrastructure management; 1,70,000 jobs in BPO industry and around 9,000 jobs in system maintenance in the years to come. No sector would be immune from job cuts in the upcoming years as AI would be the central theme in every sector of business.

Futuristic changes- There are three major areas in labour policy in India that require attention in the coming years — re-skilling workers, rethinking social policy in the short-term as well as re-examining employment potential of new sectors such as care economy in the long-term. The automation involves re-skilling existing workers, redeploying others to new tasks and retooling potential workers who are students in the university.

There is a need to encourage universities to redesign higher education and training and the state to facilitate job-market transition. There are multiple job opportunities in AI era. The use of embedded AI continues to be expanded across the majority of industries, from personalized recommendations for online shopping to the automated customer service agents that optimize the user’s experiences. Banks and retailers are early adopters, while health-care companies and manufacturers are investing more and more in AI. Transportation and utilities are expected to be amongst the fastest-growing industries for AI products, expanding by 60% compounded annually through 2020.

It is predicted that AI would outperform human beings in activities such as translating languages (by year 2024), essay writing at secondary school level (by 2026) and truck driving (by 2027). There are a variety of job opportunities emerging in an era of automation. The skill development of manpower with respect to the jobs of Data scientist, ML developer, Blockchain developer, UI/UX designer, Cloud software Engineer, etc. would be in great need in upcoming years. Data scientists would help to sort out large volumes of data easily and organise it to extract valuable insights that would help to take right decisions and optimise important organisational processes. Blockchain Developer would also hold a key place in banking sector, technology companies, consumer product brands, manufacturing concerns, media organisations, life sciences, healthcare, telecommunications,etc in future.

The new job roles that would dominate the IT workforce are within the digital domains such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and cybersecurity, etc. Tata Group is exploring use of automation to improve the lives of rural workforce and working on a precision agriculture technology where an unmanned aerial vehicle or a drone can be used for aerial spraying on farms. Artificial intelligence is expected to create 2.3 million jobs globally and become a positive ‘net job motivator’ by year 2020.

Artificial intelligence software is emerging out as the most disruptive force in technology and the organisations embracing AI technologies are getting a competitive edge whereas those who don’t adapt to the changes have the great risk of extinction in future. The process of adaptation to the new technology has already begun and the early examples of the same include – Google Photos, messaging chatbots, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa,IBM Watson,etc. Due to these recent updates, regular apps would struggle to survive in the competition due to productivity differential of AI-integrated software.

Technological innovation not necessarily leads to ‘technological unemployment’. The Union Government has introduced the Artificial Intelligence hub in Interim Budget 2019-20. In an anticipation to the loss of jobs due to automation and AI, the NITI Aayog of India, has proposed to set up a labour utilization fund in order to tackle the growing issue of redundancy of low-skilled labour. The labour utilisation fund would be utilised to train the people at the bottom of the pyramid to be competitive and well-versed with the growing technology. This would eventually attract foreign companies to hire people from India and would lead to tapping the potential Indian Human manpower resource.

(The author of this article, Lt Col (Dr) Satish Dhage, is an ex-Army officer and has been qualified for IPS (Indian Police Services) through IPS LCE 2012. Presently, he is Director, MGM Institute of Competitive Exams Aurangabad. For any queries or feedback, he can be contacted on email id: drsatishdhage@gmail.com)