IT automation: Taking toll on jobs and fresh hiring – The Indian Express

Written by Johnson T A | Bengaluru | Published:April 25, 2017 2:02 am

Last week following a presentation at the Bengaluru office of a multinational US software services company on robotics and automation, a few software engineers asked a vice president of their group whether it would be possible to delay implementation of automation in their areas of work. They were sure that their jobs would be in danger if the automation processes that were proposed were implemented, says the senior company official.

While issues like regulation of H-1B visas for Indian software professionals to work in the United States tends to dominate the discourse on job concerns in the information technology world thousands of tech jobs have been rendered redundant in India over the last couple of years with machines taking over the responsibilities of human workers.

If eight people were needed to insert a correction into the software code for a client on the cloud at the peak of the cost arbitrage model, a machine can do it now. The jobs of eight people have become redundant. That is what automation is doing and this is challenging the business models of traditional IT companies, says Ravi Prathap a software engineer and founder of a tech start up.

Last year Infosys Ltd is reported to have automated as many as 9,000 jobs with the company reporting the release of as many as 2,700 workers from automated jobs in the third quarter alone. The software business at Wipro Ltd is reported to have seen as many 4,500 jobs automated last year. The CEO of Wipro Ltds software business Abidali Z Neemuchwala and the CFO Jatin Dalal have in recent times stated that the firm is investing aggressively in its automation suite Wipro HOLMES. The firm is estimated to have asked as many as 350 people to leave on performance considerations in the last quarter.

Infosys Ltd which at the end of March 2017 had 1,88,665 employees added only 6,336 employees last fiscal compared to 16,283 in 2015-16 and 14987 in 2014-15

My personal view and all of us share this view is that automation and AI are perhaps larger forces to catch on to, more than any other specific disruption that will take place either industry specific or US visa regime or any Brexit or anything like that, Sandeep Dadlani, Head Infosys Americas, said recently.

With automation, the number of people we are hiring will not be the same. It will slow down a little bit, says Krishnamurthy Shankar the Group Head, Human Resource Development at Infosys Ltd.

One of the things that people in the IT world are advising young graduates coming out of engineering colleges to join the IT service industry is to develop skills in cloud computing security and network security which will continue to be in demand despite automation.

We must embrace automation. We must stay in automation. We must become masters of it. We can only do that through skilling and through education We have to become entrepreneurial, says Infosys Ltd CEO Vishal Sikka.

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IT automation: Taking toll on jobs and fresh hiring - The Indian Express