Artificial intelligence (AI) was the new electricity and it can almost be described the second industrial revolution. It would affect everyone and pervade all sectors from education to health, fintech, agriculture and old school industries in the next 5 to 10 years, said experts at a panel discussion.
India should gear up for the entrepreneurial and job opportunities that would come out of new technology, they emphasised.
Experts from Google, Amazon, Mphasis NEXT Labs and Venture Capital company Kalaari Capital participated in an interactive session on ‘Technology Tomorrow’ as part of the ISB Leadership Summit-2017 held at Indian School of Business here on Saturday.
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Pankaj Gupta, Director of Engineering, Google Next Billion Users, said students should ignore the sensational newspaper headlines about the impact of AI, but listen to the experts involved in the technology. The new technology would lean more towards intelligence assistance and automation in every sector.
On the concerns that artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) would take away jobs, Mr. Pankaj agreed that jobs would be lost and therefore a choice of career was important. For instance, audio transcription jobs would be lost as automatic speech recognition was emerging. Jobs in call centres, medical imaging, telemarketing, para legal and low-level technical jobs were at risk, he said.
Sriraman Jagannathan, VP, Payments, Amazon India, however, has a different view and he predicts an explosion of new opportunities in a developing country like India which was embarking on rapid digital transformation with different bandwidths and languages. There was difference between knowledge workers and those doing repetitive jobs and knowledge workers in India would find new jobs and opportunities in the technology of tomorrow.
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Jai Ganesh, VP, Mphasis NEXT Labs, agreed that conventional jobs would be lost, but new jobs would be created under new technology.
Mr. Pankaj advised the students to have right skill sets and learn coding, an important skill. Equally important was appetite for learning new technologies all the time. “The ability to learn is not taught in schools. But everything is available on internet and those who know how to learn will rise in their career,” he said.
Vani, MD, Kalaari Capital, laid more emphasis on multi-disciplinary skills. Investments of about $12 billion were made in AI alone in the last 10 years and it was doubling now, but India’s share was only mere three %. “As venture capitalist, I believe in making investments with returns. Deep technology with intellectual property value is not bubbling up in India to invest.” On the future of digital wallets in the context of Google launching a new wallet, she said no one digital wallet would dominate the scene in India. All banks have adopted UPI and at least three to five players would be strong in digital currency.