According to a recent research, the cases of generative AI might change the range of work for around 1% of India’s IT workforce, who work in sales and support, and could generate an additional $2 to $3 billion in income for the sector.
Currently, 300,000 individuals work in sales and support roles for India’s $245 billion computer services sector. According to a survey by IT market intelligence firm UnearthInsight, this will have an influence on the work of 50,000 to 60,000 people i.e. around 1% of India’s IT workforce, over the course of the following three to five years.
How will Generative AI affect the IT workforce?
It need not result in job losses because these jobs will be affected in a way that allows for increased collaboration with coworkers and AI-powered technologies, the report added.
Gaurav Vasu, founder and CEO of UnearthInsight, stated, “It’s not like the staff will be replaced. “Google and OpenAI, the companies behind the generative AI language models Bard and ChatGPT, claim it will result in more jobs. New positions like prompt engineers and system consultants will be in demand.
Similar predictions that “jobs will vanish” were made when computers first appeared in the 1980s, but Vasu claimed that they would simply lead to the development of fresh employment.
In the long term, he said, Indian IT services companies would make money by combining business process outsourcing (BPO) services with proprietary generative AI technology to alter enabling activities for customers. “Initially, these solutions will appear as cost-optimization initiatives,” he added.
According to the UnearthInsight research, the sales, support, and enabling divisions’ reliance on full-time equivalents (FTEs) will decline in the future, while the productivity and quality of positions will both rise.
According to the research, roles like pre-sales, bid management, sales enablement, and solution architect may be influenced by AI copilots who generate leads or select sales material.
Similarly, generative AI technology generated profile screening, applicant recommendations, and individualised onboarding might alter various hiring and resource management processes including external hiring, internal fulfilment, and onboarding.
On-demand reporting, AI-powered scenarios and prediction, auto warnings, and regulation reports might have an influence on positions involved in financial analysis, modelling, and forecasting within the internal finance department.
The majority of sales, human resource, and accounting data are housed on SAP’s or Oracle’s platforms, thus generative AI solutions will be made available to clients alongside their software, according to the research.
According to Sid Pai, the founder of venture capital company Siana Capital, generative AI would net-net benefit the world economy. It will benefit most industries, including IT services, in different ways. Generative AI now only improves creative work, such as code, literature, or essays, and it also increases productivity.
Pai, the former head of the APAC area at IT research company ISG, argued that a direct link between automation and the removal of employment is impossible to anticipate and unrealistic.
According to UnearthInsight, the IT services sector will spend $50 to $100 million by FY25 on generative AI solutions for sales, support, and enabling tasks that will revolutionise employee roles and experiences.
The Indian IT sector, together with SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce and other smaller bolt-on solution providers, will eventually take these solutions to customers with return of investment metrics, potentially generating an extra $2–3 billion in revenue over the following four–five years.
According to a Ficci-Access Partnership paper published this month, using generative AI to augment job tasks might help the Indian economy unleash $621 billion in productive potential, or 18% of GDP in 2021.
According to the report, the manufacturing, wholesale, and retail trade sectors make up the biggest portion of this potential since they employ a sizable portion of the working population and have high worker productivity.
