Will all AI jobs be filled ?
As the next
big opportunity unfolds in front of us, will India as a nation panic and
let it pass and do nothing, or do enough to fully drive its impact on society, economy, and quality of
life of its citizens. Will India take a leadership role? Will all the AI
jobs be filled?
The buzz around is, AI is going to take away
our jobs and make us redundant. There will be unemployment as the routine jobs
are going to go away and will be done by machines or robots. Driverless cars, automatic
assembly lines, diagnostics, engineering, art, software, all are expected to be
impacted. Reports after reports are analyzing its impact and providing
estimates.
Here we are turning the discussion on its head.
We are asking “if India will be able to
fill all the jobs that AI is offering”. Do we have the ability to ride the tide?
Are our institutions and academia
ready to teach us newer ways of getting into this AI space? Are we ready at the
industry level to decode the
business problems into actionable AI components? Are we ready to rethink design and innovation? These questions are to be answered.
To capitalize on this opportunity, an AI ecosystem is required and for that,
only a comprehensive and holistic approach will help. I am seeing a lot of
enthusiasm and desire to get this done but little action on the ground. Only big
players in the industry are getting ready as they have access to global
resources of training, education, research, use case, and clients co-innovation
cells. They will form their own AI ecosystems and sail through the revolution
ahead. But these big players, as a unit form a very small percentage of the
total industry.
The real challenge will be for Small and Medium
Enterprises (SME) where the mass number of units exists. For them to have an
ecosystem on their own may not be economically viable and also take more time
than the opportunity offers. Where will they find the sustainable advantage
from? An initiative has to be taken at the industry level where the Government
collaborates with an industry, academia, trade bodies and innovation enablers.
We do have the learnings from the IT industry where autonomous bodies like STPI and
others created one of the largest opportunities for India. This time the
approach has to be much larger and deep-rooted.
The academia is equally at cross-roads. While
the Board of Studies in the academia are asking to upgrade the course content -
we recently saw an example of CBSE including emerging technologies in the
curriculum, the faculty needs to be trained to teach. Workshops need to have
real life and industry-ready use cases to train on, the models for business
innovation has to have arrived at the design thinking embedded in the processes.
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