‘AI won’t reduce jobs, will upskill workforce’: Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi at HTLS

“I think that the productivity boost that AI will bring will probably not reduce jobs directly but will redistribute jobs and upskill the workforce,” she told Vishal Mathur, HT’s technology editor.

She said AI will play the role of an assistant to humans.

“Everyone says AI is going to be different and eventually, it’s going to replace humans. My thesis is – I would think about it as an assistant to humans. And this debate about, you know, whether it takes jobs away, of course, has relevance to a company like us, which has a large employee base. But I think it’s somewhere in the middle. I think it will have a net zero effect in terms of employment overall,” she said.

Revathi Advaithi further said that the global GDP will benefit from artificial intelligence.

“So global GDP will benefit from AI. As the skill level of workers increases, it will drive productivity gains in some way, but I do not think that will impact the overall job numbers significantly,” she added.

Advaithi said AI will bring a transformation in the healthcare sector.

“AI these days is the force that’s reshaping all our lives and the world around us…if you think about it from the consumer viewpoint, you see the change every day, right? Because you’re using AI in everyday life these days…But the real transformation, I think, comes in things like healthcare, which is significant… So I’d say healthcare is probably the transformative area that we’ve barely seen today,” she added.

The business honcho said that AI would also bring a transformation in the automotive sector.

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“So in our generation, in the next 5 to 10 years, we are going to be sitting in these cars that are making everyday decisions using all the intelligence that it is getting and making decisions on which turn it’s going to take, where it’s going to stop, and all those things,” she added.

She also spoke about machine learning.

“If you’re looking at a product in the past, you couldn’t harness lots of data in real-time and make a decision, you know, around machine learning and decide whether this was a good quality product or what was happening with it. It was a little bit of a reactive process. Today we’re able to, you know, include all that machine learning in our day-to-day work around the factory itself, which is a significant example of how we use it today,” she added.

She, however, said a lot remains to be done in the field of artificial intelligence.

“But I would say there’s a lot to be done. I think that’s important to remember… in the industrial sector, you know what has happened over the last 20, 30 years is that we’ve all been sold solutions by enterprise companies that are piecemeal software that we’ve all integrated into our work and our factory. And the data don’t talk to each other. So I’d say AI looks very cool in many areas. It’s going to be transformative in many areas, but it’s also going to take time in many areas. So I think it is a transformation we’re all looking forward to,” she added.

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