TCS Middle East & Africa head

Riyadh, Jan 30 (PTI) Terming generative AI a “pivotal point” in human evolution, a top official of an Indian technology bellwether here said the advent of artificial intelligence will for the “first-time” impact knowledge workers and thus human skills will have to be upgraded commensurately to stay relevant in this fast-changing scenario.

In an exclusive interview to PTI on the sidelines of a global conference in Riyadh, Sumanta Roy, president and head, Middle East and Africa business region of the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said his company is training employees to ensure the “weakest part in vulnerability chain is not compromised”.

And, the weakest link in the chain is still the “human beings” and not the machines, which are growing more intelligent as one navigates the complex future driven by cutting-edge technology, he said.

Dubai-based Roy is attending the second edition of Global Labour Market Conference (GLMC) being held here under the patronage of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz at the sprawling King Abdulaziz International Conference Center (KAICC).

The mega event is being attended by policy makers, industry leaders, scholars, innovators and field experts from over 100 countries, in the labour sector, and a ministerial roundtable was held earlier on the first day of the two-day conference that began on Wednesday.

“This (conference) is very important. Because, what is happening is, the labour market itself is changing in multiple ways. And, if you look at technology, the same thing applies here, as well as in India. Whenever there was a change of technology or new technology came, people perceived that it will impact their jobs,” he said.

“Typically, these used to be the blue-collared jobs, but with generative AI, the perception is for the first time, the knowledge worker will get impacted,” Roy said.

The blue-collared, in fact, will not get impacted, he argued.

Because, generative AI is not going to wash dishes, or fix a car. But, it is going to write articles, it can summarise a court judgment, “so the knowledge worker getting impacted for the first time, which is the first-ever in history since the industrial revolution. It’s an interesting pivotal point. And, it applies across the globe,” the business leader said.

AI is one of the focal points of discussion at GLMC 2.0 and a semi-government company has also exhibited it’s AI platform — an intelligent chatbot at the venue.

Roy attended the inaugural conference as well but this time he engaged in a panel discussion where also brought the potential impact on the labour sector and beyond.

Asked what impact he foresaw of AI, 5-10 years down the line, he said, it is “very difficult to call it out, I wouldn’t even know what will happen in the next months, 4-5 years is a very, very long horizon”.

“But, generative AI is a pivotal point in the human evolution, it is one of the pivotal points in human evolution, and it will impact us everywhere, finance, financial sector, quality of life, both in good and bad way. You start having stuff like deepfakes, and it can be used to break your bank (account), do terrorist activities, and all these kind of stuff,” he said.

However, AI can have interventions for doctors to take better decisions, for engineers to plan better, for teachers to teach better, Roy added.

“So, it is still evolving, but it will impact every aspect of human life, and societal life,” he underlined.

TCS has nearly 10,000 employees in the Middle East and Africa region, with a large share of them being natives of India, Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and South Africa, the company’s regional head said.

Roy said in the age of AI and rapidly evolving future, it is essential that there is a commensurate growth in knowledge quotient of employees to stay relevant.

“First and foremost, training our people, so AI training covers, 60-65 per cent of our employees, who have been trained in mid-level course on AI. We are also trying to figure out the legalities, the ethical issues, and the guard rails around that..and the technology itself. How to create an ideal match of those,” he said.

Underlining the role of humans in this evolving future scenario, he cited an example that if a computer programme is written by an AI instead of a human being, then two things have to be ensured — that there is no security violation and no backdoor entry for hackers to get in.

“Ability to understand the programme, from system architecture perspective, system integration perspective, testing perspective, documentation perspective becomes important and those skills humans will have to do it. That an AI cannot do,” he asserted.

On which skills would perhaps remain primarily a preserve of humans and not machines, Roy said, “…pure analytical abilities, to create things that are aesthetic, created by human hands like this grand building hosting the conference… it cannot be done now, but I do not know about the future.”

Roy also cautioned about deepfakes, and asked if a copy of Michaelangelo’s art can be created. There are two programmes, one creating an art piece, the other pointing out the difference between the two, iteration goes on and on, “adversarial network”, it is called, Roy said.

Slowly, it cannot differentiate between the two ones. But, blockchains could stop that, he added.