AI will amplify and help humans progress, says Adobe India director Vyshak Venugopalan

Will AI take away my job?’

That’s a question that has been asked time and again, and rightly so.

AI experts like the
Nvidia CEO predicted that AI could replace coders
. Former HCL CEO predicted that AI could lead to
IT companies in India needing 70 per cent fewer people
. However, speaking at the India Today Conclave 2024, Vyshak Venugopalan, Director Solution Consulting at Adobe India, and Samik Roy, Executive Director, India & South Asia at Microsoft India, showed a brighter picture of AI’s impact on jobs.

“AI will lower the floor so more people can enter. It will democratise creativity to a large extent. At the same time, it will also elevate the ceiling, so that we will all be driven — with the help of enablement and education — and the professionals will be elevated to uplift the quality of work”, says Venugopalan. “And that is what has happened in any other transformational wave of technology, which has come to us. It has always amplified and progressed the human race, in the longer run”, he adds.

The Adobe India executive also suggests that it is crucial to explore and apply AI now to advance careers and lives. “It is important to dip your toes in right now and understand how this can be applied to your own life to progress individual careers and life. It is important to understand it and embrace it so that it enables you to fast forward into the future,” he suggests.

Samik Roy from Microsoft India agrees. He also suggests that reskilling is an important part of the job in the AI era. “The fear [of losing jobs to AI] is valid,” says Roy, “but it is about the elasticity of the job market…it needs skilling and reskilling”. “The good part of AI is that it reduces the learning curve a lot,” he adds. Microsoft has its own gen AI tool called Copilot. The company has also invested billions of dollar in OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT, Dall-E and now Sora.

AI becoming smarter than humans

Tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and X chief Elon Musk are often heard talking about AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. There is also a lot of skepticism around this future of AI, mostly because of predictions that AGI would exceed human intelligence.