AI is disrupting white collar jobs, finds new study by IIM Ahmedabad

The report, titled ‘Labour force perception about AI: A study on Indian white collar workers’, was published by the IIMA’s Brij Disa Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. It also revealed that the number of those who believe AI will automate their jobs is slightly higher than those who believe in job creation by AI.

The report says, “68 pc of the employees expect AI to partially or fully automate their jobs in the next five years. 40 pc of responders perceive that their current skills will become redundant. At the same time 63 pc expect AI to carve new job roles over the next five years.”

There is an uneven AI adoption across industries as education, IT, manufacturing and healthcare are more actively training and exposing employees to AI while the retail, trade and infrastructure sectors are laggards in this aspect, the report says.

However, employees in the education and healthcare sectors perceive themselves to be most impacted since 78 per cent and 70 per cent, respectively, expect their jobs will be automated. Meanwhile, only 52 per cent employees of the education sector and 42 per cent of the healthcare sector expect AI to create new jobs in their industries, it further states.

The field survey for the report was conducted among 550 employees across five cities; 70,000 job vacancies were analysed and 31 executives from diverse industries were interviewed, the study mentions.