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...

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...

Touted as the world's "most human" Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that can "read between the lines" and "understand emotional expressions", Amelia has the potential to turn India's healthcare sector into an inclusive one, believes her creator Chetan Dube, CEO of New York-headquartered AI company IPsoft. Amelia got her name from Amelia Earhart, one of the pioneering women in American history who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. The tech Amelia combines automation, cognitive and emotional intelligence with Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to perform as a digital colleague. When Amelia was first created, her conversational abilities sent shockwaves in the AI community, raising fears of job losses, especially in countries like India where a large number of people are employed in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. But Dube, who left a teaching job at New York Un...

In 1998, Google began humbly, formally incorporated in a Menlo Park garage, providing search results from a server housed in Lego bricks. It had a straightforward goal: make the poorly indexed World Wide Web accessible to humans. Its success was based on an algorithm that analyzed the linking structure of the internet itself to evaluate what web pages are most reputable and useful. But founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had a much more ambitious goal: They wanted to organize the world’s information. Twenty years later, they have built a company going far beyond even that lofty goal, providing individuals and businesses alike with email, file sharing, web hosting, home automation, smartphones and countless other services. The playful startup that began as a surveyor of the web has become an architect of reality, creating and defining what its billions of users find, see, know or are even aware of. ALSO READ: 'Search' for the future: Google brings AI, more visuals ...