The evergreen debate of whether AI is a boon or bane continues in classrooms, lecture rooms and board meetings. However, CEOs often like to weigh in with what they assume is right and the latest one to do so is Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu. As usual, he highlights all the positives associated by inducting AI tools into conventional workflows.
Amidst concerns about AI displacing jobs, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has offered an optimistic perspective, asserting that AI is not a replacement for IT engineers but rather a powerful tool to significantly enhance their productivity. His remarks, made at a recent industry event in Bangalore, emphasise AI’s role as an enabler rather than a threat to human employment in the tech sector.
Vembu highlighted that Zoho has not observed AI leading to job cuts. Instead, AI is proving instrumental in augmenting existing roles. “So far (at Zoho) we definitely haven’t seen AI replacing employees,” Vembu stated, adding, “What we are seeing instead is that it’s (helping) some of the roles. For instance, say a support rep typically handles 20 tickets a day, can we help them manage 25 instead? That’s a 20 per cent productivity increase.”
This perspective aligns with Zoho’s recent unveiling of Zia, its proprietary large language model (LLM). Zia, pitched as one of India’s first enterprise-focused, homegrown AI systems, is designed to integrate into Zoho’s enterprise and productivity platforms. Its capabilities include structured data extraction, summarisation, and prompt-based coding, all aimed at streamlining workflows for businesses.
Zoho extensively uses its AI tools:
Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI at Zoho, further elaborated on the internal benefits, noting that Zoho extensively uses its AI tools internally before releasing them to customers. He confirmed that the productivity gains are tangible, extending even to customer-facing roles where aggregating information is crucial.
Vembu’s stance counters the “over-hyping” of AI’s job-replacing capabilities, urging a focus on the technology’s real-world impact. While acknowledging the advancements in AI, he stressed that it is not yet capable of handling the entire A-Z of tasks required for a complete job role. Zoho continues its active hiring, viewing AI as an augmentation tool rather than a substitute for human talent.
Challenges in building advanced AI systems:
The company also acknowledged challenges in building advanced AI systems like Zia, particularly concerning computational resources, access to enterprise-specific data, and managing public expectations. Despite these hurdles, Zoho remains committed to leveraging AI to empower its workforce and drive business growth, reinforcing the idea that the future of work lies in collaboration between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence.
