Human Capital in the Age of AI

We are living in an era of unprecedented innovation in Artificial Intelligence, which is going to fundamentally disrupt the way we live, consume information and work. AI is not new to humans and traces its origin back to several decades. Research on AI has been constant and the major breakthroughs and theoretical advances have made significant strides over past few decades. What has now made even more giant leaps is the computing power and how we can use AI using LLM or in short ChatGPT . Think of this as the browser moment of AI. A moment in a journey that can be compared to where Internet met with the first browser a decade after its invention, which led to exponential growth and usage over the next 3 decades. A similar browser moment is the where blackberry and i-phone met smartphones and modern cellular communication.This browser moment(Chat GPT) is going to bring its wave of innovations in AI. We are going to see an explosion of AI applications and its adoption on a mass scale across almost every industry in the next 3 to 5 years.

Chat GPT and the likes of Generative AI will become game changers in content creation and can replace basic human intelligence jobs that require basic to moderate intelligence, where content curation, and repetitive tasks tasks are predominant. As such, we predict that many white collar professions and service oriented jobs are going to become extinct or change permanently as AI usage becomes dominant in business over the next 3 to 5 years. The displacement of workforce is inevitable. However, one should note that AI in itself cannot function seamlessly without human intervention and validation of results to make sure they make sense. This means that while the technology itself will increase productivity, displace workers, it creates an opportunity for re-skilling/ up-skilling for an average worker. We predict that almost in every industry and profession a 10-20% re-skilling/up-skilling on AI related areas will be required over the next 3 - 5 years.

We predict up to 10% displacement is certain industries such as Services, Information Services, Financial activities, Professional and business services, Education and health services, Leisure and hospitality. This accounts to ~19M jobs over the next 3-5 years that might be either replaced by AI, or need re-skilling/up-skilling. To keep track with the high tide, Companies will be need programs to manage reduction-in-force and train their employees to adapt to new AI paradigm. Companies will also need new talent with specialized skills in AI paving the way for more talent that drives the AI innovations even further.