by Jaafar Siddiqui
Experts fear that in the coming years the need for IT services in India will significantly decrease due to the rise in RPA and Artificial Intelligence.
Over 3 million IT jobs in India will be completely replaced by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation processes by 2022, which will help IT firms save $100 billion mostly in salaries, according to a report published by Hindustan Times on Wednesday.
One of the most important part of the Indian IT sector is Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO). India provides inexpensive IT services which have driven multiple companies from all across the world to outsource their needs to India. In the recent years, India has seen a phenomenal growth in BPOs, increasing its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product from 1.2% to 5.4%, and its current rate of growth being 28%. With AI, the BPOs are rapidly replaced by Robot Process Automation (RPA) and this is an upcoming challenge to the Indian economy.
RPA is a software technology that can identify the users need and automatically fulfill them without any human involvement. In simpler words, consider RPA as a manager of automated online bots, whose job is to align bots to fulfill the need of the users emulating the human involvement and accelerating the process.
“RPA is a type of software that mimics the activity of a human being in carrying out a task within a process. It can do repetitive stuff more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly than humans, freeing them to do other tasks requiring human strengths such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and interaction with the customer’’, said Leslie Willcocks a professor and researcher of Information systems and RPO.
Experts fear that in the coming years the need for IT services in India will significantly decrease due to the rise in RPA and Artificial Intelligence.
According to the World Economic Forum’s survey 2020, it is expected that by 2025 redundant roles will decline from 15.4% of the workforce to 9%. But that’s not it, there’s another side of the emerging professions that will grow from 7.8% to 13.5%. The survey later discovered that by 2025 around 85 million jobs may be displaced and there’s going to be a massive division of labor between humans and machines.
This shift in working trends is going to heavily effect countries like India in the manufacturing and computing department.
An Oxford Economics research suggests that the global stock of robots will multiply and reach up to 20 million just by 2030. The big question is how India will tackle this shift in the market trends?
Further to bring this into perspective, let’s refer to 2020 where 85% of customer service interactions were responded by Chatbots with minimum need of human involvement and majority of the E-commerce platforms have already started to implement Artificial Intelligence to enhance personalization and provide a better user experience.
India has already started to adopt Artificial Intelligence. Back in January 2021 the Ministry of Statistics took measures to implement AI in order to monitor the economy better by signing up for a $60 million program with World Bank. But the question still remains, how will India continue attracting foreign investments in the world of robots and the loss of 3 million jobs?
Jaafar Siddiqui earned Bachelors in Journalism from the University of Hertfordshire — United Kingdom. He writes for The Milli Chronicle on Business, Politics, and Culture.
