AI will create more jobs than it destroys: IBM India

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) begins to threaten certain jobs, Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia, has said that AI will actually create more job options that it destroys.

Speaking to IANS, Patel said that he has seen technology and multiple innovations evolve over a period of time.

“I firmly believe AI will create more jobs than it destroys. People are usually very scared when imagining entirely new jobs. For example, take the Internet, when the Internet came right, and you had web publishing and all things that were web-enabled, it led to job decline in certain sectors like newspaper printing,” he explained.

However, it also resulted in entirely new job categories like web design, data science, digital marketing and web publishing, which employ millions of people, he added.

“So, one of the things which we have been very articulate about and keep harping on is that re-skilling will play a very important role,” Patel stressed.

While 46 per cent of the companies in India are currently training or reskilling employees to work together with automation and AI tools, it leaves room for a lot more to be done.

“This is something that the government clearly recognises,” he said.

When we look at employees within the organisation, 50 per cent say they are excited to work with new AI and automation tools.

“So, the question now is how do you train a vast pool of people? Everyone can’t be a coder or AI developer and so on and so forth. You have to learn to work with these technologies as they evolve,” Patel told IANS.

According to Minister of State for IT and Skill Development Rajeev Chandrasekhar, technological talent, not chip-driven compute power, is the key to India's progress in AI.

"Talent is a much more fundamental challenge in AI. We need universities to churn out masters and PhDs in AI. Talent is something that keeps me awake at night. The infrastructure pieces will get solved very quickly," he said at an event last December.

There is a serious need for the tech industry and academic institutions to work along with the governments globally in shaping the future pipeline of talent for AI-related jobs, he stressed.