Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean Technologies, said that artificial intelligence (AI) is still a long way from replacing human workers. He added that most companies are still having problems getting employees comfortable using the technology effectively. Jain also said AI should be viewed as a tool to assist workers, not to replace them. The US-based Glean Technologies specialises in providing enterprise-grade AI and search capabilities.
“When we started the company seven years back, AI was actually not as powerful as it is today. And so we never really thought about this as anything more than a tool, an assistant that can actually help us, maybe go a little bit faster in work that we do,” he said while speaking at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit.
No widespread job elimination:
Jain said he was not seeing the widespread job elimination across large enterprises with rising anxiety over automation. He said most companies are still in the early stages of adopting AI and are focused on training workers, not redesigning jobs.
“There are many who will talk about how you can replace this role with AI or that role with AI. But practically, like we work with the largest enterprises in the world, and we’re not seeing any role getting eliminated. Not today,” he said.
According to him, many businesses are still at the beginning of their journey with the technology. Rather than making major changes to job structures, most organisations are currently concentrating on helping employees understand and learn how to use these new tools effectively. “The number one thing is, can you make people feel comfortable with AI? Can you actually make them not fear AI? Can they think of it not as an adversary but rather as an assistant, as a companion, as a colleague of theirs?” Jain asked.
His view differs from the concerns raised by several prominent business leaders over the past year. Several executives have warned that advances in technology could reshape office-based jobs and change hiring needs. Among them are Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has spoken about potential effects on professional roles, as well as Jamie Dimon and Jim Farley, both of whom have highlighted the possibility of workplace changes as companies increasingly adopt automation and new digital tools.
Who is Arvind Jain?
Arvind Jain is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur and the CEO of Glean, a Silicon Valley startup that helps employees find information and work more efficiently across the tools used by their organisations.
He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and subsequently earned a Master’s degree from the University of Washington in the US.
Jain joined Microsoft in 1997, where he worked on building large-scale software systems. After that, he joined Google, where he spent more than a decade and became a Distinguished Engineer. While at the company, he worked on Search, Maps, YouTube, and other signature Google products.
Before launching Glean in 2019, Jain was involved in the launch of Rubrik, the cloud data management and cybersecurity company that has since become a huge enterprise technology firm.
Glean has seen rapid growth under Jain’s guidance as firms seek more efficient methods to manage information and boost workplace productivity. In 2022, the company was worth nearly $1 billion before growing to a valuation of approximately $7.2 billion by 2025, as per reports. Investors and enterprise customers showed interest.