Two recent prescriptions/descriptions from two world-known Indian CEOs and another world-known Indian, Mr. Nadella are noteworthy as they show two different versions/visions of “way of work” in the next five years, if not the next twenty-five years.
On October 23, 2023, N R Narayan Murthy, the founder of Infosys and one of the most respected individuals in the IT Services space had a message for India’s youngsters. He stated that “work culture must change, and for India to compete in the world, they must work 70 hours a week. This is the only way for India to increase its competitiveness, which is the lowest in the world and is also impacted by corruption and bureaucracy. So, India’s youth must change and become very disciplined, extremely hard working and contribute to the country’s well-being.”
Here’s the link if you would like a recap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk4B40Vc7nk
More recently, there was the statement by the chairman and managing director of Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Limited S.N. Subrahmanyan that working hours must be extended to 90 hours per week, and asking employees to come to work on Sundays too rather than “staring at their wives/spouses?” at home. Although L&T later said that the statement by their Chairman reflected a larger ambition for making India a developed nation, it has raised both serious and humorous discussions about “work”.
Here is a link to his statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KuAqe6_BtI
Of course, there has been a lot of controversy about both these speeches in India, especially since it has de-facto become the “back office” of the world and where “services” exports have been mostly based on wage arbitrage based call centers, application maintenance and programming/coding jobs. It also raised questions about CEO salaries and their relative work load. However, these remarks may also be applicable to many other countries including the developed countries as technology advances and disruption are “country-neutral and domestic productivity continues to be anemic.
In a completely different forum and context, Satya Nadella also gave a speech at the AI tour keynote in London on October 21, 2024, on AI (copilot as the UI for the AI and the use of Copilot Studio as a low code/no code tool and autonomous agents, etc.)
Have a watch here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vVWFTzOt24
If you dissect components of his speech, you can infer that Microsoft and other AI vendors have and are investing billions of dollars and plan to deliver a cost-effective AI World. If so, then more work would be done by these “autonomous agents” and not humans working 70/90 hours a week.
If these AI-driven agents are well designed and are pointed to the right artifacts by a few “knowledgeable” humans, then it is going to take many “humans” doing manual work out of work. Even Indian MNCs would embrace AI agents since they do not want to deal with unproductive workers either, and it would not matter if they worked 70 hours or not. For many, at least in the professional and shared services functions, there just will not be any work. This is a very unsettling message to “office/back office workers” whose jobs are to reconcile, read and redirect, search manually for data/videos/images/documents, collect supporting material, keep track of tasks and delivery, create presentations, etc. Most of this work would be done by AI agents.
For example, a recent study claims that around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. Significantly, these impacts are not restricted to industries with higher recent productivity growth. Our analysis suggests that, with access to an LLM, about 15% of all worker tasks in the US could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality. When incorporating software and tooling built on top of LLMs, this share increases to between 47 and 56% of all tasks.
Of course, achieving this GenAI utopia would require humans to create various models, artifacts, workflows and new agents using system prompts, and know where to point the agent to these relevant artifacts, and learn new vocabulary (trigger, knowledge, action/escalate/notify/workflow, output…), etc.
Naturally, this new AI-driven world will create new opportunities, which would require many to reorient or retrain themselves, but sadly, not everyone will be able to cope with this new world as it requires a vastly different knowledge set. The same happened to horse buggy drivers when automobiles came on the scene, when we went from paper to spreadsheets and from Blockbuster to Netflix. But change is happening.
So, where would be these work opportunities be for “office/IT services” workers in this new AI world?
The current conventional wisdom indicates that this AI/ML revolution will continue to add jobs in the bottom two layers of the AI stack, namely, the semiconductor (e.g. Nvidia, AMD, etc., and even Quantum computing, when it becomes a reality) layer and the infrastructure/cloud layer (Azure, AWS, GCP, Snowflake, and data centers etc.). The opportunities in these layers always existed – these are just going to grow. So, the real “hardcore techies” can still flourish and would be in demand. The third layer – the foundation/model layer (e.g. OpenAI, Meta, Gemini, etc.) is new and exciting and there will continue to be tremendous activity and jobs in this layer and it would be a bonanza for people who can marry business requirements and AI/ML driven solutions with some knowledge of Python (for example). Also exciting is the “business application layer” where companies have and are going to build models specific to vertical industry (e.g. legal, health, etc.) problems and even solutions that will allow for identifying opportunities for generative AI in companies and determine how many jobs and tasks can be “AI’ed.” This will open up new opportunities for those who straddle between business analysis and technology awareness.
Of course, this will not happen overnight but is happening amazingly fast even in SMBs. Read here. Another example of this potentially rapid disruption is a company that claims to assist other companies in accelerating their GenAI journey. It claims that “our software constantly scans multi-million publicly available data points across thousands of jobs and hundred thousand plus tasks. And can show which jobs and tasks will see the biggest acceleration opportunities with GenAI.”
Needless to say, the only survivors in this brave new world will be those smart, talented people who want to learn and learn and unlearn and re-learn.
Murthy and Subrahmanyan versus Nadella and the future of “office” work (ers)
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So, it is not about a 70/90 hour week commitment, nor it is that AI is going to destroy all jobs. Note that industrial robots have not destroyed all manufacturing jobs. But we are at a crossroad where Darwin’s evolutionary thesis is meeting the Andy Grove’s dictum: “only the paranoids will survive.” And we should all go back and read Brave New World where Aldous Huxley who in1931/1932 warned us that advanced technology could take over and humans could lose their humanity. The future of work(ers) and who can actually find work to do is going to face a massive change. Not sure if this generation is even ready for it.
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