Threat of mass unemployment due to AI is overblown: Tech Mahindra CEO Mohit Joshi

Mohit Joshi- Tech Mahindra

The threat of mass unemployment due to the incorporation of artificial intelligence into businesses is overblown, according to Mohit Joshi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tech Mahindra.

“This threat of mass unemployment is overblown and especially overblown from a technology perspective. It (AI) will give an enormous set of capabilities to people, it will allow people to move up the learning curve much faster than they would have two decades ago,” Joshi said at the NASSCOM Tech Leadership Forum 2024 on February 20.

This comes at a time when businesses across the globe are increasingly adopting generative artificial intelligence to improve productivity and efficiency and reduce costs.

The Tech Mahindra chief added that generative AI will only increase the productivity of talent removing the performance differential that exists among different levels of the workforce.

“AI is such a powerful equaliser, that it really gives superhuman capabilities to almost every human. This is the Ironman suit that we were all waiting for,” he added while speaking with Akhilesh Tuteja, global cyber security leader, head clients and markets, national alliances and TMT Industry Leader at KPMG in India.

Joshi also chimed in on the debate of the mode of work in the future and said that for the majority of people in the world, their job involves working with other people. He believes that collaboration is more fluent and natural when employees are in an office setting.

“Working from home is productive only if you're going to spend masses of time linearly going through a set of tasks, thinking through a business line or writing code,” he said.

Joshi added that the future of work will hence be hybrid. “The future is very clearly not working from home and it is also not really gonna be five days a week, 22 days a month working from the office. So we will find a happy median somewhere over the next few months, sooner than we expected,” he added.