Artificial Intelligence (AI) has slowly and steadily made its way into our lives. But it is now making rapid leaps into our workflows.
A quick reckoner of its impact would be the utter pervasiveness of chatbots in customer service operations. Try and remember the last time you spoke to a customer care executive instead of chatting with a ‘bot’ when, say, raising a dispute with a cab-hailing service, or while initiating an exchange on an e-commerce platform, or even for banking services.
According to an EY report, an AI chatbot developed by a US fintech carried out 2.3 million customer interactions in a month, alone doing the work of nearly 700 agents. Although this remarkable productivity has enticed businesses, human executives are anxiously staring at layoffs lest their job description should become ‘redundant’ (read: automated).
Just last week, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet announced the firm’s pivot towards AI even as its quarterly reports indicated that its global workforce shrunk by 11,000 employees in the last three months. Earlier this month, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff u-turned from his July statement ‘you need the human in the loop’ and let go of over 4,000 customer support jobs because of AI automation.
In July, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced laying off more than 12,000 employees as a result of incorporating AI models at scale.
The question most early and mid-career employees now find themselves grappling with is—Would I be replaced by AI too? To try and find an answer, The Quint spoke to leading recruitment firms Randstad India and TeamLease on:
Which sectors are witnessing rapid transformation because of AI?
What kind of jobs are more likely to get redundant?
What will be the future of jobs in India?
But before that: