Your jobs that robots can snatch

In times when an e-mail sells products online, interactive voice response (IVR) answers customer queries and an app provides insurance advice, lesser men will scramble for jobs. India, which has been branding itself as a destination with cheap workforce, will face the biggest blow.

Artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive computing and similar progress in automation is performing human task at a much wider scale, without fatigue and errors at lower costs. "Both customers and organisations like automation. Hence, it will take off. For the first time, intelligent human tasks are being automated, as opposed to jobs that require physical work," says Santanu Paul, co-founder and CEO, TalentSprint.

According to an Oxford report, 45% of American jobs will be taken over by computers by 2033. Similar is the theme that plays back home. A large number of well-paying jobs in India are under threat as well. "One million job will be lost in the next 10 years. My estimate is that 50,000 jobs will be lost in the year 2017 ," says Aditya Narayan Mishra, CEO, CIEL HR Services.

Any job which is repetitive and does not require creativity can be axed in favour of automation. However, the following jobs will come under scanner first.

Coding decoded

Ironically, automation, an invention of the IT industry, will cannibalise its own inefficiencies first. Entry-level software coding and testing, which comprises of around 30% of software jobs in India, are under threat. Native coding is losing sheen as large tech companies are preferring reusable codes. Even testing has become instantaneous.

"Companies are using tools that generate codes automatically. There are automated testing tools that can check regression testing, which is checking the changes that a new line of code can make to an existing app," informs Rishi Bhatanagar, chairman of IoT panel at Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) India​.

While high-end programming remains a human game, simple code writers drawing large salaries are now a thing of the past. "Most software testing solutions are already substantially driven by intelligent programs, and human intervention will slowly taper off. Five years ago, IBM coined a term 'autonomic computing' which can be best explained by a simple phrase: computer heal thyself. In other words, large and complex enterprise computing systems involving dozens of servers can come with in-built self-correcting codes that otherwise require a large maintenance team," says Lovleen Bhatia, co – founder and CEO, Edureka, an online learning platform.

ChatBotics blur BPOs

Traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) which hired large office spaces and employed large number of young professionals, have also vastly evolved. Automatic response systems or IVR can produce spontaneous and human-like responses, making human intervention unnecessary. In addition, BPOs have employed data analytics to memorise complaints, understand customer needs better and cross-sell products, improving their efficiency manifold.

"Jobs that follow at set process and require no human judgment like data entry, data validation, automated formatting, web scraping and text mining, can be better performed by bots," says Dinesh Goel, CEO and co-founder, Aasaanjobs, an online HR marketplace.

Medical marvels

IBM Watson for Oncology can perform a task otherwise impossible for even the best doctor in the world. It can digest a vast amount of research created on cancer in various formats from text to video along with a course in medicine only to offer the best diagnosis for a patient. While a doctor is still necessary, co-botics as it is termed, is becoming very popular in medicine. Apart from offering the best second opinion, robotic surgeries by da Vinci are becoming popular as well.

"A surgeon told me that in some cases, he would require his wrists to turn 180 degrees to perform a surgery with the best possible results and minimum damage. A robot can achieve that," said TalentSprint 's Paul.

Tutors and para-legals

Digital learning bots are slowly replacing private tutors and coaching centers. Bots can offer a wide range of course material, offer honest opinions on scores, train them in areas that require work, and offer customised and tailor-made schedules to help students perform better. Online training modes are also much cheaper than hiring private tutors.

Even legal referring work, which involves going through a large number of documents, case research and forensics work requiring scanning reams of data, is being replaced with automation efficiently.

Until recently, a large number of the aforementioned jobs have been at the lower-end of the knowledge ecosystem. "There are 45% of the total knowledge worker jobs at risk on account of automation. However, class II/class III level of automation which requires cognitive platforms and intelligent process automation is yet to happen. The immediate threat is to the jobs affected by class 1 or basic process automation," says Malay Shah, senior director, Hi-Tech sector with Alvarez & Marsal.