Artificial Intelligence is being heralded as a revolutionary tool and so it is.
But revolutions have their victims and India is in danger of having its workforce losing out as AI becomes ever more powerful and the need for actual human bodies decreases, even in middle class white collar jobs.
The threat of this was made patently clear recently when Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s biggest private sector employer and largest IT services company, announced that it will cut more than 12,000 jobs – equating to 2 percent of its entire workforce – in middle and senior management levels.
The decision, TCS said, was taken to make the company “future ready” as it pours money into new areas and deploys AI at scale amid huge disruptions in its traditional business model.
Gone are the days when TCS relied on cheap skilled labour found in India to produce software for global clients at lower costs because AI has now allowed for greater automation and clients are demanding more than just cost savings on manpower.
To be fair, companies are chasing after workers who have skills in AI, cloud and data security but these are not making up for all the jobs that are being axed.
Industry body NASSCOM (the National Association of Software and Service Companies) has already warned that India needs 10 lakh AI professionals by 2026 but not even one-fifth of the country’s IT professionals are AI-skilled.
India already struggles to accommodate the millions of graduates that join its workforce every year, many of them armed with computer engineering or related degrees. Until just a few years ago, India’s IT majors would absorb 6 lakh fresh graduates every year but in the last two years that has fallen to just a quarter of that number.
If employment options in this sector collapse, at least for those who have come through colleges and universities that have not yet included AI in their curricula, the country will struggle further to fulfil the aims and obligations of the youth.
Just like computer-based AI systems approach problems with cold calculation and no empathy, do not expect companies to care much for workers who are fired or those never hired in the first place. Profits must grow at all costs in the dog-eat-dog world of global capitalism and those left on the sidelines by the advent of AI will have to find their own way forwards.
