By: Uttara Choudhury

Amazon’s popular Super Bowl TV commercial laid out a whimsical crisis in the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Its digital assistant Alexa loses her voice. We already know that Alexa can play your favorite music, order you an Uber, tell you where you've parked your car and turn off your lights. So what to do in a world so dependent on artificial intelligence in business and at home? Enter a series of celebrity stand-ins, including Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins, who goes into creepy Hannibal Lecter mode and unnerves the people he's supposed to help. Thankfully, Alexa recovers her digital voice and restores order. AI proves its irrefutable value.

When it comes to the vast opportunities and possible perils of artificial intelligence, learning and reasoning by machines without the intervention of humans, there are lots of opinions out there. The 2018 edition of the One Globe Forum brought industry experts and government officials together to weigh in on the impact AI and automation would have on jobs in a country like India.

Panel moderator Dr Shailaja Fennell, a lecturer in the Centre of Development Studies, at the University of Cambridge clearly saw a revolution on the horizon. “A few weeks ago, I read an article about artificial intelligence in the Hindu Business Line which was optimistic about AI creating jobs for Indian engineers, computer scientists and data analysts,” said Dr Fennell. “That is indeed correct for the 15% of India that is global, but we know there’s a larger 85% of India immersed in the informal sector so is AI a blessing or a problem?” she asked.

Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Tech Mahindra, responded by saying that in contrast to the often-heard doomsday commentaries that robots will replace human workers, he was confident that AI would actually create more jobs than it's expected to eliminate. “As a company we think very strongly about the opportunities that AI can create. A lot of companies see AI as transformational,” said Mr Mitra.

“However, we are at a juncture where we need to take some drastic calls. Otherwise, even the 15% which includes the Indian IT services industry and my industry is staring at a huge risk. The work we do today — whether it is Accenture, IBM, us or any Indian IT services company — a significant portion of that work between 55-to-65% of those jobs can go away,” predicted Mr Mahindra. “If we don’t re-skill, if we don’t retrain ourselves in a fairly anxious and paranoid manner, we are going to lose out big time,” he added.

The old outsourcing model is fast disappearing and Indian information technology companies are riding a tsunami of intimidating change. These IT giants are reinventing and disrupting themselves by embracing automation and the holy grail of artificial intelligence. In February, Tech Mahindra, India’s fifth largest IT services company, announced it would invest 100 million Canadian dollars over five years to set up a center of excellence in AI and blockchain in the Canadian city of Toronto. Similarly, Infosys, India’s second-largest software and outsourcing company, launched its second generation AI platform Nia to score new deals with Western clients in its biggest market, North America. Infosys’ Nia platform offers client's bigger AI supported business solutions linked to forecasting revenues, analyzing what products to build and demystifying customer behavior.

According to the research firm, IDC worldwide spending on AI hardware, software and services will jump to $58 billion by 2021, up from just $12 billion in 2017. An AI spending boom would boost growth at enterprise software firms, cloud computing providers and IT service providers. By 2020, AI will generate 2.3 million jobs, exceeding the 1.8 million that it will remove, research firm Gartner said in a report.

In October last year, Tech Mahindra and AT&T launched an open-source artificial intelligence software project called the Acumos project with the Linux Foundation. It aims to make developing AI predictive tools as easy as building a website. “Acumos will expedite innovation and deployment of AI applications, and make them available to everyone. We could create a whole library of AI solutions,” said Mr Mitra.

Thousands of years ago, the Agricultural Revolution transformed our ancestors into farmers. Hundreds of years ago, the Industrial Revolution turned farmers into factory workers. Dozens of years ago, the Digital Revolution changed factory workers into knowledge workers. Today, the AI Revolution is again upending certainties about employment. In response to the tech revolution underway the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship has identified new jobs and new skills that would be in demand in future. It is re-skilling young Indians in the emerging technologies by working through Sector Skill Councils, Training Providers and independent Assessment Agencies.

“Over the past three years we have tried to combine the basic literacy and numeracy part with imparting Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and soft skills in all our skill development training,” said Jyotsna Sitling, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. “Learning has always been the surest antidote to technological redundancy. We are trying to build course modules, and curriculums that impart practical training so that our youth have the skills to deal with a rapidly changing tech landscape,” added the joint secretary.

India has a demographic youth bulge, with 100 million young people joining the workforce over the next decade. Given this demographic trend, it's important for India’s youth to be steeped in a curriculum focused on the integration of technical literacies, such as coding and data analytics, with uniquely human literacies, such as creativity, entrepreneurship and ethics. This integration will develop a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover and produce original ideas in the AI age.

“We are working with industry bodies and Sector Skill Councils to ascertain where we are losing jobs because of AI. This information management system has to be very agile and responsive. We keep addressing the challenges with our partner institutions working with us on skill development,” said Joint Secretary Sitling.

Many are worried that young people's horizons are not broad enough for them to operate in an increasingly globalised and multi-cultural economy. “Can we talk about how global skills might play a crucial role and what we could learn as a global community,” asked moderator Dr Fennell.

Panelist Ronit Avni, founder and CEO of Localized, responded saying that the future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally. “We are in a moment in history where location, and where you live does not determine where you can contribute if you are connected technologically,” said Ms Avni. “Countries, particularly small countries, like Moldova for example, that have lost 30% of their top talent to brain drain, can for the first time harness the intellectual capabilities of their Diaspora professionals no matter where they live and channel it to the communities that need it most though technology. That’s new, that’s only because of smart phones, and robust internet connectivity.”

Diaspora professionals already send money home but growing numbers of successful immigrants now want to share their time and expertise, or “knowledge remittances,” says Ms Avni. As a result, her company Localized connects students and aspiring professionals in emerging markets to Diaspora professionals who share language, roots and cultural context to access career guidance from what the company calls “guidance from people who get it.” Piloting in Arabic and English, Localized was among 12 technology companies out of 500 selected to join the NYU accelerator, StartED.

The Jordanian government, for example, is working with Ms Avni’s team at Localized to connect Diaspora professionals to university students in Jordan. “We are live in Jordan at the moment in the Mena region. If you’re a student studying renewables in an engineering school, and you’ve never talked to somebody who deals with smart grids, although you’re professors are good they have been in academia for 15 or 20 years. They’re not in the market and the market is changing at warp-speed. The only way for you to be future-proofed is to have people several steps ahead of you, in a career community to guide you. It is unknowable presently to discern what the jobs of the future are going to be,” said Ms Avni.

Will artificial intelligence be disruptive? Of course it will. It will change the employment landscape, displacing millions of workers who thought their jobs were safe. However, new jobs and entire new business sectors are also likely to be developed as a result of AI. “Disruptive changes to business models will have a profound impact on the employment landscape over the coming years. The World Economic Forum has cited a statistic that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist,” said Ms Avni. “We cannot train for jobs that haven’t been invented yet, but we can train for being nimble, agile, adaptive, and creative.”

Retraining, re-skilling and lifelong learning are seminal to preparing students for the future. “From my perspective, it’s a trifecta — you need to have a versatile disposition. Firstly, are you hardworking, adaptive, and willing to re-skill if necessary? Secondly, can you get those skills and can you transition quickly to enter a new growth sector? The third piece revolves around your career community because even if you have those skills, you won’t be able to identify the right jobs, and the right doors to walk through without the right professional advice and support.”

“The government understands that job creation both in the formal and informal economy rests largely on entrepreneurship,” said Joint Secretary Sitling. “Skilling and entrepreneurship complete each other,” she added, while noting that India's unique combination of entrepreneurship, innovation and skills would drive innovation.

A huge number of startups have been founded in the AI space breaking new ground in deep learning, neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, and more. In July last year, it made headlines when Google acquired Bangalore-based Halli Labs that was focused on building AI tools like deep learning and machine learning systems. It’s notable that AI start-ups like Halli Labs have come out of India and grabbed Silicon Valley’s attention.

In a world where technology is changing at warp speed, the biggest risk is standing still. Therefore, the government is trying to foster startups by creating 500 new tinkering labs, 100 new incubation centers while assisting existing incubators. India currently has about 19,400 startups valued at $75 billion steeped in new technologies.