There’s no stopping the march of AI. Unveil massive upskilling programmes for our techies

It makes sense for us to secure our economic base by upskilling and training the people in this economic segment, if not beyond it as well, about AI. (Representative image)

The L-P-G reforms begun in 1991 were the fulcrum that India used to pivot from a socialist economy to a market-driven one. It provided disposable income to the masses, allowed a consumption-driven economy to take off, and made much-needed capital available for national transformation. It ended our overdependence on the public sector, leveraged the private sector for national development, and enabled societal transformation by giving many new outlets for our youth.

Today, however, due to artificial intelligence, several sectors including manufacturing, energy, healthcare, insurance, IT, etc. are going through a churn. Moreover, the education and skill framework which worked in the early years of those reforms no longer suffice. Thus, there is a need to reimagine our pedagogy to align it better with our current national and global ambitions.

Inevitability Of AI

Before delving into the question of why a reimagining is needed, it is important to understand the inevitability of AI. Despite the clarion call for stopping its development by various leaders in industry and academia, it is quite clear that AI is only going to catapult further ahead. This is because of various reasons.

First, the time and money savings that firms are seeing due to AI has made companies invest heavily into the R&D of new machine learning models, even outstripping the world of academia. Second, due to worsening demographics, the developed western world must pivot to AI to maintain and improve its productivity numbers.

Third, several real-life benefits in areas of healthcare, medicine, optimisations etc, are organically driving its adoption and growth. And finally, a definitive transition to Industry 4.0 is underway, with deployment of AI being most prolific in automation and robotics. Thus, AI is inevitable.

Indian Youth Woefully Underprepared

So how well-versed are our youth to deal with the age of AI? The India Skills Report 2023 by Wheebox shows that only 50.3 percent of our youth are employable. For technical degrees like BTech, that number is 57.4 percent. Furthermore, the employability of those who finished their education recently (22-25 age group) is higher than others, showing that former students suffer an even larger deficit. Seven out of 10 companies mentioned a skill gap among prospecting candidates, and over 80 percent of companies (across sectors) don’t want to hire freshers. Thus, the picture isn’t rosy at all.

Another manifestation of this low employability, abysmal productivity, and easy replaceability is the stagnation in the salaries of freshers for nearly a decade.  AI, which is already adept at doing an average job, should cause much consternation within this segment of workers, as their replacement by increasingly competent AI algorithms appears very likely.

Therefore, an acute need to bolster education and skills exists. As the definition of “employable” itself changes due to mass adoption of AI, this will be a particularly challenging task. Shifting goalposts could make our already unimpressive employability numbers trend further downwards.

Macroeconomic Case For Upskilling

Beyond the needs of the youth, there is also a profound macroeconomic case for upskilling in the light of AI. The Indian middle class is less than 25 percent of the population but has a disproportionate contribution to GDP, in the form of private consumption, at nearly 60 percent.

Mass AI adoption could cause much dread to this segment as less than four out of ten people belonging to it have degrees or technical diplomas. Further, their wages also rely largely on unstable professions, with only half of them drawing regular salaries.

Thus, it makes sense for us to secure our economic base by upskilling and training the people in this economic segment, if not beyond it as well, about AI. Without the middle-class firing, the government’s reform and development agenda would fall flat on its face. The politics of unemployment and reservation is a clear indictment of the extant job insecurity that India already suffers from, and it could get much worse with new disruptions.

Reimagine Our Tech Curriculum

A final reason why we should reimagine our academia in the light of AI is for the attainment of our national priorities. Currently, as revealed by Stanford’s AI Index, when it comes to research, publications, seminars, and employment in the field of AI, the US is the undisputed heavyweight. China trails it by a big margin but is still orders of magnitude larger than the UK which occupies the third spot.

Thus, a clear siloing of the technology is developing, and without upskilling we won’t be able to break this duopoly. Second, our labour force needs to be globally competent if we want to benefit from the free movement regime in services that we are negotiating in our trade agreements. And finally, in this era of near-shoring or friend-shoring, businesses are seeking locations that are not just safe and conducive but have the right kind of talent. We shouldn’t miss the AI bandwagon if we want to leverage this fabulous opportunity that has only recently emerged.

In conclusion, we can see that there is a two-fold skill gap that we need to fill. First, among existing students, and second, among former ones. There is also a need to reimagine our existing technical curriculum, something which has started with AICTE’s 2020 guidelines, and other skill development initiatives. Without a strong thrust on AI, the dreams of a Digital India by 2030, providing 25 percent of the world’s workforce by 2025, and becoming Aatmanirbhar could all become a dud.

Srimant Mishra is a computer science engineer from VIT university, Vellore, with a deep interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He is currently pursuing a law degree at Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.