Heena Sharma Blog

  The Covid-19 pandemic is making companies automate their workforce faster than expected globally, while firms with operations in India are accelerating their automation and digitisation above the global average, a World Economic Forum (WEF) study showed on Wednesday. The year-long study on effects of automation in the workplace and the outlook for robot revolution found that the ‘future of work’ has arrived early due to Covid-19 and may lead to 85 million jobs getting displaced in the next five years in medium and large businesses across just 15 industries and 26 economies. At the same time, the robot revolution will create 97 million new jobs, but communities most at risk from disruption will need support from businesses and governments, the World Economic Forum said. These new jobs would mostly emerge in the care economy, in fourth industrial revolution technology industries like artificial intelligence, and in content creation fields. Read More

Today, it’s not just humans competing for work in banking. Machines are becoming a threat to warm-blooded number crunchers worldwide. Indeed, almost one-third of financial-services jobs could be displaced by automation by the mid-2030s, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP last year. Despite those stark forecasts, some optimists argue that the rise of machines at banks isn’t simply taking away jobs, but rather changing their definition and adding some roles. Job seekers with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science are among the most in-demand candidates in finance, according to hiring sites Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Hired, and ZipRecruiter. It’s not only disrupters such as Square Inc or Stripe Inc hiring this talent; legacy financial companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and Morgan Stanley are scooping these people up as well. In the US financial sector alone, job postings that list these big data skills as requirements incr...

Amazon.com Inc is rolling out machines to automate a job held by thousands of its workers: boxing up customer orders. The company started adding technology to a handful of warehouses in recent years, which scans goods coming down a conveyor belt and envelopes them seconds later in boxes custom-built for each item, two people who worked on the project told Reuters. Amazon has considered installing two machines at dozens more warehouses, removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people. That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory. Amazon would expect to recover the costs in under two years, at $1 million per machine plus operational expenses, they said. The plan, previously unreported, shows how Amazon is pushing to reduce labor and boost profits as automation of the most common warehouse task of picking up an item is still beyond its reach. The c...

The rise of automation has so far had a negligible impact on jobs at a global scale, the World Bank chief economist said, despite common gloomy predictions that humans are set to be replaced by machines. While advanced economies have shed industrial jobs over the last two decades, the rise of the same sector in East Asia has more than compensated for the loss, according to an annual report published by the Washington-based international financial institution. “This fear that robots have eliminated jobs -- this fear is not supported by the evidence so far,” the World Bank’s Chief Economist Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg said in an interview.The World Development Report 2019 is the latest in a series of efforts by academics, consultancies and governments to assess the impact of new technologies on employment. Past studies have often forecast automation will destroy more jobs than it creates. In its report, the World Bank instead stresses that the nature of work in the fut...

With cloud computing becoming more prevalent in companies, both large and small, the global requirement for professionals is steadily on the rise and over a million jobs in the sector will be created in the country by 2022, according to a report. Companies are currently investing 4.5 times the rate of traditional IT spending in cloud infrastructure, and it is expected to grow even faster by 2020, according to a report by ed-tech platform for executives Great Learning. The report is based on conversations with senior cloud experts, recruiting managers as well as subject matter experts and is supplemented by data from high-quality industry research reports. In the coming years, however, nearly all IT expenditure will be on a private, public or hybrid cloud environment, making all IT roles, in some sense, cloud computing roles, it added. The Indian cloud computing market, currently at $2.2 billion, is expected to grow to USD 4 billion by 2020 with an annual growth rat...