BENGALURU: With the lull in the job market continuing and fears of more job cuts increasing in the IT sector, vice-president of Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) Sri Krishnan said that it is the low-end IT enabled services and BPO jobs that will disappear in the next five years. Krishnan is also the head of the firm’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) division in India.
“People’s fear of AI is new, but it is the next industrial revolution. When automation started in the textile industry in the UK or when the steam engine appreared, there was fear that machines would replace those jobs. With productivity going up a 100 times, there was also fear as to who would consume those things, because people wouldn’t have jobs. But soon men reskilled themselves to work in manufacturing plants,” he pointed out. “What you are seeing now is not mechanised job automation. This is about intelligent jobs getting automated, so people need to get rid of their fears.”
Transactional jobs can be automated. This ‘robotic process automation’ will take over these jobs. Work like data entry, reading an invoice etc doesn’t need a human, unless he or she is doing more intelligent checks. But, these intelligent checks can also be automated now.
“It is high time people start re-skilling themselves — not just the ones who are on the job but also those in the education system. Even a classical engineer will not have a job unless he knows machine learning and AI topics. Pure classical software programming, also called sequential programming, will not survive the next 10 years,” Krishnan pointed out.
Beyond formal educational systems, the biggest experts on Deep Learning have their videos on YouTube now, Krishnan added, pointing out that it is only aptitude to learn that will help job-seekers now.