Will AI take my job? Adobe’s Vyshak Venugopalan and Microsoft’s Samik Roy on aftereffects of artificial intelligence

The discussion featured insights from Vyshak Venugopalan, Director Solution Consulting at Adobe India, and Samik Roy, Executive Director for India & South Asia at Microsoft.

Reflecting on the perennial question of whether AI will displace human jobs, Samik Roy of Microsoft offered historical context: “This is an interesting discussion which comes out every single time there is an invention out there. You know, when the steam engine was invented, people said, oh my god, locomotion will take away jobs. After that, electricity got invented, the second industrial revolution, and people said, oh, all the manual processes are going to be now automated and jobs will go away. Then came computers, the internet, and people said, oh, now computers will take away all the jobs. But let’s just step back.”

Roy emphasised the importance of skilling and reskilling in adapting to the changing landscape brought about by AI: “What I would say is it needs skilling and reskilling. The good part of AI is that it reduces the learning curve a lot so people can learn faster. You know the difference between the previous era and this era is in the previous era we used computers and automation to bring information at your fingertips. That’s what people try to do. They try to digitise places, they try to digitise people, they try to digitise data. In this era it is about expertise at your fingertips. So even a common person by using a lot of these AI-generated models can produce better results. So skilling will be very very important and redeployment.”