Speaking at the summit on a panel titled “The Macro View: What It Means to Become a Leader in Digital and Artificial Intelligence,” Jayashree Satagopan, corporate president and chief financial officer of Coromandel International, said: “There will be layoffs because of artificial intelligence. But this is nothing modern. During the Industrial Revolution, we saw aged jobs become redundant and processes become dependent on machines. However, this does not mean that our jobs will be taken away from us. By appropriately improving our qualifications, we will be able to find a better job. Recent jobs will also be created.”
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Dilipkumar Khandelwal, CEO, Deutsche India and Managing Director and Global Chief Information Officer, Corporate Functions, Deutsche Bank, agreed. “There will be change, but other things will add value to people’s work. We need to adapt and the level of jobs will be raised,” he added.
Upskilling mantra
Others also agreed that to ensure redundancies create modern job opportunities, “upskilling and reskilling” the current workforce would be key.
“Raising qualifications and transversal skills is not a challenge, it is a reality. The message is not to get lost in translation,” said Sigal Atzmon, founder and CEO of US healthcare company Medix Global. “We need to implement these movements and ask ourselves how to better understand artificial intelligence,” he added.
These industry experts further highlighted how they are leveraging AI and Generative AI in their fields. Sajid Malik, chairman and managing director of geospatial services company Genesys International, said: “Using artificial intelligence, we are helping governments plan urban cities and plan for the digitalization of India in one of the largest urbanization processes in our history. For the first time, the enormous information contained in spatial data opens up various possibilities. This is a huge step forward.”
AI: a versatile ally
Coromandel-based Satagopan cited examples of AI being used in agriculture and manufacturing as key examples. “A good example is precision farming – you collect all the data on soil, nutrients, temperature and more, and then give advice to farmers on how to improve yields. In manufacturing, logistics and supply chain, productivity needs to be improved in various aspects. The value captured by AI must be quantified. All information should be easily accessible to both end users and management to enable decision-making,” she said.
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Deutsche’s Khandelwal proposed three key areas of focus that companies are looking at internally to measure the impact of AI. “First, AI can be used to simplify existing operations and boost efficiency. Secondly, we are looking at modern business models that disrupt our existing ones. Third, our competitor may come from a completely different industry because many other companies outside the field are innovating beyond the established industry they focus on,” he explained.
Leaders at the helm
However, to effectively leverage this opportunity, Satagopan stressed that company management must take up responsibilities. “The role of business leaders will be to understand the role of technology and communicate with it. Today, there is a lot of structured data that needs to be leveraged and can make a huge difference. Today, what 50 people do, one person can one day do. We saw this during the industrial revolution, now artificial intelligence is leading to it. However, we must ensure a warm environment to make upskilling accessible,” she said.
Medix’s Atzmon added on that note that the focus on promoting data privacy cannot be abandoned. “Ethical handling of data is crucial. Privacy is not a challenge; we wake up with this every morning. When investing in human resources, we must adapt to the regulations in force in individual countries,” she said.
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To ensure that all these elements work together, it will be equally essential to promote learning as a key element of the organization, Khandelwal emphasized. “When we run immense setups, cultural and academic factors are essential. We want to make sure that everyone in the company understands that a learning culture must be very essential,” he added.
As such, top executives have confirmed that AI can have a transformative impact on work across industries. Each insight summarizes a key driver of digital transformation and innovation that currently revolves primarily around artificial intelligence – a factor that will likely determine how technology spending in organizations across industries evolves in the coming years.
Tech jobs are also likely to evolve accordingly, giving rise to what each executive described as the next generation of work in the coming years.
