The Rise of AI: A Growing Concern for IT Professionals?

From language translators, face recognition to assistants like Alexa and Siri, many of us rely on these real-world applications that are AI-driven. The use of machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, and IoT is growing at lightning speed. From ML-driven medical diagnosis models to product recommendation systems, its growth is accelerating. Today, organizations are increasingly harnessing AI's capabilities to automate mundane tasks in HR, marketing operations, customer service functions, and even their offerings.

But there is a persistent fear that still lurks: will these technological solutions slowly creep into most jobs and eventually replace the workforce? Especially among IT professionals, there is a growing concern about the magical rise of AI in the technology workplace and its implications.

Reality is already here

For businesses, AI has proven to deliver significant advantages through its contributions to developer productivity. By automating various back-end processes using AI, organizations have saved costs and minimized the workforce's hours spent on them. Sectors such as financial services are heavily investing in AI for automation processes while telecom companies receive huge customer care calls, paving the way for AI to handle automated voice calls. AI is also helping businesses operate more efficiently, especially in analyzing consumers' online behavior. Over time as the algorithms learn and evolve, they will eventually turn out to be more effective than humans.

According to an analysis firm, Oxford Economics, new-age technologies will replace 20 million jobs by 2030. It may thrust the existing young employees to newer departments or threaten their otherwise stable jobs. We need to come to terms that there are specific jobs that are better handled by advanced AI.

Does this mean IT professionals have something to be concerned about? Well, the answer is not entirely a no. To fully understand the impact of AI, one need not look further than industrial automation using machines and then later computers. In every cycle, automation has threatened to exit jobs but has given rise to completely new business sectors and areas that have created new jobs. AI is no exception to that general phenomenon. Yes, several existing jobs will be replaced by intelligent machines and software, but new jobs will be created.

Opportunity in the disruption itself

They say if you can't beat them join them.  The underlying fact is that there is a vast AI skills shortage, especially in a country like India, which produces thousands of IT professionals every year. As businesses become digitized and automated, the demand for new AI-capable tech talent across all industry verticals is on the rise. There is a clear opportunity for IT professionals to be agents of disruption themselves and skill up on AI technologies.

As we speak, new job opportunities are created in this field. Organizations are gearing up to embrace digitization, but they need a workforce with digital skills to step up the game. According to the AI Index 2021 Annual Report, 1.14 lakh job postings were of the AI intelligence industry out of 50 lakh jobs in 2020. The same report states that the state of Karnataka topped the list with 41 percent of total AI jobs. With such promising possibilities, the IT workforce of today can only expect a better future where the workforce is likely to comprise man-machine hybrid teams.

A human has strengths like empathy, judgment, cognition, while AI has speed, accuracy, computation. The future of work will depend on how well these strengths blend to generate better business outcomes. All in all, AI's rapid adoption across various sectors are seeing a rising demand for AI experts. Therefore, one can explore a career in AI to work in these industries.

Opportunity beyond the disruption

One can expect that AI will accelerate the creation of completely new areas and sectors. Some key examples that come to mind are renewable energy, electric, self-driving vehicles, mining in space, home automation, and next-generation urban transport.

All these completely new areas could be bigger than the financial services area which today employs many IT professionals today.

The areas may need IT professionals to develop new skills compared to previous areas like financial services or ERP. Some of the new areas may be massively distributed systems, microservices architecture, large hybrid cloud infrastructures, hyper-scale data architectures.

What is the next step?

The next step is two-pronged. First, tech professionals must be willing to embrace change and develop their digital skills. They must fully understand that the key to continual growth and advancement is in learning. By being proactive and taking control of their learning, they will make great strides in their career progression. Further, continuous learning will enhance their job transitioning prospects to newer posts, either within the same organization or a new one.

Secondly, to address the skills gap in the workplace, organizations should provide their IT workforce with personalized learning to go as far as their skills, ambition, and imagination take them. In short, they should democratize learning. Learning and development leaders must also recognize that learners are getting it hard to find time for their learning in today's work setup. In a recent Skillsoft usage study, 76% of those who participated in a learning journey wanted more learning opportunities. But, according to industry thought leader Josh Bersin, the average employee only has 24 minutes a week to learn. Therefore, organizations should bring in new tools that will enable the learners to access content more readily to adapt and evolve, developing new skills and capabilities in areas like machine learning, robotics, and AI. In addition to core technical skills, AI will fundamentally change the nature of the workforce. Matrixed worldwide teams, across countries and cultures, will be commonplace. Interpersonal skills of communication, process skills of agility, will be very important for success.