In this note I focus on two themes that have been resonating with me for a while. The first is about the changing nature of our jobs. My role requires me to look at the jobs that our students need to be prepared for and I have noticed a trend which seems to have escaped notice in the mainstream media: The creeping use of artificial intelligence based systems in jobs that were previously considered irreplaceable. A few weeks ago, I was in Miami at the GMAC Leadership conferences where the keynote speaker, Thomas Davenport, spoke about the way artificial intelligence had completely transformed jobs, and done so in a way that was not been very noticeable. The development of systems such as IBM’s Big Blue and Deepmind’s AlphaGo (referenced in the Economist article below) have significantly improved what machines can do. Davenport shared with us that in the Law Business large numbers of jobs formerly performed by lawyers were now done by computers leading to a significant decline in job opportunities. The list of industries affected is wide-ranging: radiologists, where scans appear to be better read by AI systems, Accountants, Journalism and almost every other industry. I was stunned to read in Ford’s excellent book: “The Rise of the Robots” that a large number of stories put out by news agencies may be written, researched and released entirely by AI systems without intervention by humans – that a system may monitor events on the media, do an intelligent search, do some background research, put it all together, and you have a story ready to go. The fact is that we all need to be thinking through what aspects of our jobs will be done by computers in the future, and more important how can we upgrade our own skills to become more effective working in this new reality.
I enjoyed the two articles below. The fact that an artificial intelligence based system can play GO with the world champion and win is incredible and this fact would have been unthinkable (at least to those who know the game) 10 years ago. And the second article is fascinating in that it reports on a study by Pew Research which found that 65% of all individuals believe that much of the work done today will be done by computers in the future. However, the kicker is that 80% of people surveyed believe that their own job will be safe…after all disasters often happen to ‘others’!
For years people have focused on organized retail in India and despite broad assertions organized retail continues to remain less than 10% of the market. Most forays into organized retail in India have failed. But two years ago, I started noticing that one form of retail was beginning to thrive….the online. And it wasn’t in the tech savvy educated cities, but Prashant Tandon, then CEO of HealthKart (while speaking to the Walton College’s India Study Abroad Program) had said that the biggest growth had been in India’s fourth tier cities – there was a huge demand by consumers in those areas where the country’s creaking infrastructure did not allow quality products to reach easily through organized retail. The fierce competitive battles currently raging in India between Amazon and Flipcart (the two main online providers), suggest that maybe, we will be skipping the organized retail segment entirely. This has happened before: Unlike in the US land based phone lines never reached a high level of penetration in India. As late as in the 1980s when I was in India, it took several years on the waitlist before someone could have a landline based phone installed at home. And while companies were investing in landlines, the industry effectively became obsolete as cell phones completely dominated the country. Indeed, growth in the industry was so strong (for several years India added 3 million users a month) that several innovations both in product and cost occurred in India. The article below is a key lesson that perhaps we should not expect industries in emerging markets to follow the same trajectory as in the more developed countries.
One thought on “The Future of Jobs; Ecommerce and Industry Trajectories in India and Emerging Markets”