Robots kick-start race for skills at the workplace
The next time you get a call checking your interest in a job opening, chances are you may be talking to a chatbot on the other side of the line. Gurgaon headquartered People Strong, a human resources (HR) technology solutions company that has been managing HR back-end for several multinational Indian and foreign companies, has been using a chatbot for the past six months to assess a potential candidate’s interest in a job, run profile checks on a candidate’s suitability for a job, and perform several other routine HR functions.
“We invested around ~50 crore in automating our recruitment assessment processes but more than recouped our costs,” says Pankaj Bansal, cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO), PeopleStrong.
Even though the firm’s top line grew by 60 per cent over the past one year, it just had to add 50 new recruiters in 2016-17. The previous year, it had added 250 heads to maintain the same growth momentum in its top line.
PeopleStrong is one among the many businesses taking this route. In January this year, the law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas started using artificial intelligence software to analyse and extract clauses from contracts and other legal documents. The software maker claims on its website that it could save 20-90 per cent of time spent on contract review, without sacrificing accuracy.
Last year, ICICI Bank announced deploying software robotics to take over repetitive tasks. The bank said it planned to automate up to 500 business process functions. It is not only the back-end processes that are easy pickings for automation and digital disruption. Information technology (IT) consultants say automation and digitisation are now knocking on doors of finance functions in many businesses. Next: How Indian IT is reskilling itself
While automation and digitisation bring in productivity improvement in people and process, the flip side is that jobs profiles over time get taken over by machines and software. Software major Wipro last year moved 12,000 engineers on different projects as the work they did got automated. So did Infosys, with nearly 8,500 people. Similarly, the Indian automobile sector has seen a steady drop in jobs at the shop floor level, with increase in automation and use of robots reducing reliance on labour. “The kind of jobs a new carmaking plant will generate now could be lower by 10 per cent, compared to the plants that came up in the past,” says an industry executive. “The jobs that are likely to feel the heat of automation the most relate to IT and IT services, banking and financial services, back-office processing and basic customer-facing engagement services,” says Nishith Upadhyaya, head-advisory and knowledge, SHRM India, an association of HR professionals.
Low skill and high transactional jobs are more prone to getting automated. So are the transactional and processing related jobs, say HR experts.
Earlier this year, a study by McKinsey & Company said that 52 per cent of jobs in India are automable or have the potential to be automated. That could potentially put 233 million jobs at risk, say HR experts. Similarly, a study by HfS said that India is likely to lose 640,000 jobs to IT automation by 2021. However, without sounding alarmist, HR experts point out that this move towards automation will take place over a period of three to five years. It is not that some jobs will vanish overnight. “Some fraction of the current job profile will get eliminated with role consolidation. The key drivers of automation move will be productivity improvement,” says Moorthy K Uppaluri, managing director and CEO, Randstad India.
Automation and digitisation also mean that as some job profiles get changed and consolidated, new ones will open up, requiring different skill sets. “It is not about man versus machine. Both have to co-exist,” says Shyamal Mukherjee, chairman, PwC India.