At a time when there is fear that increasing automation will lead to layoffs in the IT sector, HCL Technologies CEO Anant Gupta has said, “Automation won’t kill jobs, it will kill tasks.” “We have replaced mass hiring with just-in-time hiring,” Anant Gupta said. It is widely believed that technology and automation will increasingly to eat up jobs in sectors such as IT.
Labour Bureau recently surveyed eight sectors and out of them, information technology and business process outsourcing sector (BPOs) have seen the highest decrease in employment during October-December 2015. Zinnov, a Bengaluru-based consulting firm, recently came out with a report that said that internet of things (IoT), or machine-to-machine communications may eliminate a whopping 94,000 jobs in India’s IT industry over the next five years.
Last month TV Mohandas Pai, an IT industry veteran said that increasing automation would shave off 10% of incremental jobs in India’s IT sector each year. He said that middle-level managers would also bear the brunt of artificial intelligence. By Pai’s calculations, every year if IT creates 2 to 2.5 lakh jobs, 25,000-50,000 jobs will disappear. Pai is of the view that, middle-level managers account for 10 per cent – or 450,000 people – of the 4.5 million (45 lakh) strong IT industry in India. Half of them (2,25,000) would lose jobs over the next one decade as their work would get automated.
