- Vishal Sikka urges global workforce to learn AI amid rapid industry changes
- AI boosts individual productivity beyond entire team outputs, says Sikka
- Sikka advises new professionals to master AI for impact in key industries
At a time when the onset of artificial intelligence is leading to dynamic changes in IT workforces of both domestic and foreign companies, Vianai Systems founder and CEO Vishal Sikka has a blunt directive for the global workspace: "Learn AI. Learn, learn, learn."
Speaking exclusively to NDTV Profit, the former Infosys chief executive dismissed traditional anxieties surrounding job displacements, but urged employees to focus instead on the unprecedented productivity gains offered by the large language models. He argued that the industry is currently witnessing a 'profound improvement' that allows a single individual to exceed the output of entire teams.
“Those [mundane tasks] are, you know, more and more showing up inside the AI,” Sikka said. “The productivity of one person or two people doing something with that AI far exceeds what was possible to do before... and they might end up replacing the work that used to happen with a team of people”.
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He backed this shift with a case study from a major Indian firm that used AI to shrink a monthly reporting process from 15 person-days down to just five minutes. He added that the urgency stems from the "breakneck speed" of current technological adoption, thereby leaving a much smaller window for transition than previous industrial shifts.
“How fast can we abandon the parts of the business that are sinking and how fast can we jump our workforce onto the new things that are growing is going to define the winners versus the losers,” Sikka said.
For those at the start of their careers, Sikka's advice remained focused on mastery of the underlying technology to solve "breathtaking" problems in healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing.
“Learn what it is, learn to understand the underlying technology itself, learn to use it,” Sikka concluded. “Learn AI, learn to use AI”.
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