Automation, machine learning and digital platforms are radically changing the work, workforce and workplace; we are benefitted to have Swaminathan Santhanam, Senior Director at Capgemini Technology Services India Ltd, popularly known as Swami for detailed discussion on the future of work which is being reshaped by two trends productivity and competitive advantage.
Q- As Automation, digital platforms and other innovations develop at an accelerated pace, how do you see future of work in India?
In my view, there will be a lot of newer opportunities that will open up and I beg to differ from the view that jobs will be taken away from humans. Human needs that additional power to make effective decisions or do their jobs more efficiently. Technology automation will go onto help human performance thereby allowing the human potential to be realised fully.
The issue that we will have is our preparedness for this change. While we boast of human capital base today but we will have challenges in skill upgrades. If the workforce do not get skill upgrades either themselves or through organizations, we will have lots of talent issues.
Q- A recent PwC report says “AI will create as many jobs as it displaces” How do you see possible scenarios for employment growth in near future?
I agree to this finding that AI will create as many jobs as it displaces. There are new types of jobs that are emerging due to this paradigm shift. With Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud becoming the norm, addition of AI to this will only create more opportunities. If all these technologies are employed well in enterprises, it will make the life of employees much better thereby helping them to realise their potential. Even if these technological advances create 10 – 15% improvement in productivity, performances of the enterprises will be phenomenal. Again key to preparing people for this change is skills or mindset.
Q- How AI and Automation are transforming the workplace and organizational culture?
Let me specifically take an industry example. AI can significantly help in recruiting the right talent to the organization. Today the recruiters spend a lot of time in scanning through resumes or they are not able to proactively attract certain type of talent that will be beneficial to the organization. This is where I see AI playing a significant role in helping to choose the right candidate for a job. These AI engines can compare the job needs to the skills of a candidate and provide you with close match candidate besides throwing some additional social profile information.
These social profile information do help in filtering candidates who will suit the organizational culture. In this entire scenario, I only see AI complementing the recruiter in choosing the right candidate.
Similarly, IoT is making a big wave in the manufacturing industry. There are many clients who want to draw intelligence from the IoT devices and analyse them and give the right product or service to customers. In my previous assignments, I have seen a customer adopting RFID and Vision technologies to enable an employee to be productive in an assembly line. In my view, this is a great value addition of technology to do things FIRST TIME RIGHT.
Q- What are your observations on workforce for future and how to manage the upcoming workforce transitions?
India boasts of young workforce in the entire world. We are seeing millenials starting to occupy the workplace and they are completely different breed compared to earlier Gen-X work generations. They believe in more collaborative working, group thinking, impulsive in nature and so on. They exhibit consumer behaviour in everything they do and it brings a new set of challenges for the organization to deal with such workforce. It’s important that organizations prepare for this change and accordingly enable technologies that are more forward looking. For example, these employees expect an enterprise social network in an organization as it helps them to communicate and collaborate amongst co-workers. They expect mobile app for any of their internal services that they will need to work in an organization. Besides organizations need to enable peer-to-peer recognition frameworks that will help these employees in getting recognized then and there rather than wait for a manager to recognize someone’s contribution that too as part of appraisals. Unless an organization is prepared with such technologies in their enterprise, it will be difficult to attract such talents.
Q- Any concluding remarks?
With more and more technological innovations taking place, the workplace of the future will be very different. I am very optimistic and equally excited about the change it will drive into an organization. This brings in a huge opportunity for every stakeholder in the organization. For employees, the learning that they will get will be phenomenal and the more the hunger they demonstrate, their growth in the organization will be faster.
You will see manufacturing industries adopting Google glass type of solutions to enable employee productivity, Hololens type of solutions that gives immersive experience to their customers and employees.
Organizations that adapts to these changes faster will be LEADERS and organizations that do not recognize this change will be left behind.
About Swaminathan Santhanam: He is currently Senior Director at Capgemini Technology Services Ltd, India helping their clients in their digital transformation journey. Prior to Capgemini, Swami has donned multiple roles of Global Delivery Head / Business head at Adrenalin and was responsible for entire Customer facing operations, including product engineering, global sales, delivery and customer support. Swami was instrumental in building Adrenalin product which is being used by 700+ clients and close to 800,000 users across the globe.
During his time at Mahindra Satyam [now Tech Mahindra], Swami had his stint at Microsoft Technology Center in Boston and Redmond where he executed some turnkey projects on latest Microsoft technologies. Swami is an ardent Microsoft Technology Evangelist and has done many touchdown programs in Microsoft Technologies to its various customers. Swami holds a Master in Computer Science and MBA in Human Resources field. Photo Credit- People Matters
