Enterprises in India are rapidly moving into adoption of automation and cognitive technologies, and the appetite seems to be only growing
Automation is an aspect that has become a necessity for industries. The technology has various proven benefits such as increased productivity, reduced direct human labour costs and expenses, improved robustness in reduced time, and so on. In an interview with DataQuest, Nishikant Nigam, EVP & Chief Delivery Officer at CSS Corp, talks about the importance of the technology, and its reality in the Indian IT industry.
Automation is no longer a technology decision, rather a business decision. By leveraging technologies like AI, automation, and analytics, businesses can understand and map customer behaviour, deliver products and services to the market faster, and create new avenues for revenue generation.
With advances in technology and its democratization, intelligent automation is no longer a differentiator, but a basic necessity in today’s environment. If a company is unable to adapt to this, they would find it very difficult to survive and stay afloat.
CSS Corp has built two unique cognitive automation platforms for IT & Network Operations (Back-office) and Customer Experience (Front-office) operations. Our platforms promote symbiotic convergence between automation, business process modernization and reimagine customer engagement models at different junctures to drive effortless engagements. These are not generic platforms, but contextual ones built around solving specific problems in customer engagement and productivity.
What impact will automation have on the job scenario?
According to the ‘Future of Jobs’ report by the World Economic Forum, nearly two-thirds of today’s job roles have at least 30% of tasks that could be automated based on currently available technology. However, all job roles cannot be automated, at least not yet.
In the digital era, some functions, tasks, and jobs are human-only, while others are bot-only. Routine tasks that are highly repetitive are the first to get automated. However, critical functions will still have a layer of human intervention, with cognitive technologies and chatbots performing the base-level functions. For e.g. Medical prescriptions and recommendations will continue to be handled by doctors, whereas, booking appointments, retrieving patient data and analysis can be handled by AI, which can enable doctors to accelerate the diagnosis of the illness. Looking forward, we can say that most tasks will soon continue to remain a hybrid between the two, with bots and humans co-existing.
I believe that concerns around jobs have always been there since times immemorial. Even with the advent of the industrial revolution, there was a concern that people will become jobless. But these kind of macro factors have their own way of sorting out, so the youngsters of today must not unduly worry.
They must have an open mind, reskill, invest in peer-learning, and learning from different sources in order to continuously evolve, experiment, and innovate. Ecosystem partnerships between industry, government, and academia, can also help to bridge skill gaps, drive investments, and frame policies that usher in new growth.
