Retraining to Beat the Bots: How You Should Upskill Your Workforce?

As 2018 is all set to bid adieu, technology is finding its way for more innovation and revolution in 2019. The passing year though had interestingly showed the importance of Artificial Intelligence with the boom in the usage of internet bots, the coming year is now all set to take a step ahead and make it more efficient. So, upskilling your workforce is essential to beat the bots in near future. 

Focusing on this arena, Paul Writers recently hosted an online webinar on December 18, 2018 in association with Manipal ProLearn on the topic “Retraining to Beat the Bots: How You Should Upskill Your Workforce”. Dr. Vishnupriya Raghavan, Head of Programs, Manipal ProLearn and Alka Rai Sharma, Senior Manager – L&D, Flipkart, were the speakers and Jessie Paul, CEO of Paul Writers, was the host for the event. 

Addressing the participants, Vishnupriya explained that we must ensure that our skills should not be obsolete. It would not be wrong to say that AI chatbots are taking over the jobs of humans, mostly at call centers, and it is an alarming situation for humans now to retain their jobs. In fact, organisations today are required to build the culture of learning with bots and understand how AI is going to empower our workforce instead of replacing it.

Image from the Webinar

Citing the example of “Google’s AlphaGo defeating Chinese Go master in Win for AI”, she said that this win was a great accomplishment for Google’s AI research arm. Though AI had defeated the chess grandmaster in the past, but “GO” was considered more complicated than chess, for which, this victory was the monumental momentum for the AI world. 

She also cited examples of Facebook building two conversational chatbots. The bots were designed to talk to each other for better learning of the negotiation strategies. Through this process, they created their non-human language for negotiation. The list for such instances is endless. Thus, for centuries now humans are threatened by the loss of jobs for the technological changes taking place in the workspace of different domains. Even when the Indian banks went into core banking system, a lot of fear was there about loosing jobs. But the sentiments have never been accentuated more than it is today because we are presently at the threshold of the next industrial revolution. So, the developments in AI are continuing at a chaotic pace and fear for robots ultimately replacing humans is also witnessing a rising graph.

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Though AI is constantly mastering an increasing number of tasks, a lot of survey and research reports also say that we are now decades away from AI to overpower human intelligence and jobs going extinct. In a way, with the emerging importance of AI, the need for tech talents are growing, job content is also changing.

From bots to making changes in the financial market and fintech, robotics process automation has already taken the front seat. Slowly robots are going to take over data entry, handling payrolls and lot more. But the question arises whether AI will replace humans. On this note, Vishnupriya said that, “AI is about enabling machines to augment humans at this point of time. But in most cases AI skills differ a lot from human skills. So, we are actually moving forward and towards the symbiosis of the two.”

A lot of AI jobs are queued up for the near future and techies may need to switch their occupational categories by upskilling themselves in the areas of digitization, automation, and advanced AI. As these skills are on high demand in diverse workspaces, reskilling initiative is thus, considered as one of most important aspects in organizations across the globe now.

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Alka Rai Sharma on the other hand said, “As human beings we are naturally wired to resist change. Change may mean changing mindsets or doing things differently and out of our comfort zone. And I think this is the definition of AI.” She talked about AI’s importance in our day to day life by citing the example of traveling to work everyday by using a cab aggregator like an Uber or Ola. She also mentioned about the growing popularity of driverless cars and speech recognition techniques used in various organisations like Flipkart and others. So, AI is here, and it is shaping up the work we do in our everyday lives.

Image from the Webinar

Image from the Webinar

Today when it comes to creating efficient organizations, automating transactions becomes a main point of concern for every organization. And this is how AI is slowly becoming a part of today’s work. She also said that AI is here to replace jobs that can be automated, which also means that upskilling or reskilling is essential to stay updated with the industry needs and master all AI related work. 

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Upskilling programs are a good way to stay updated and earn certifications in upcoming and in-demand AI skills. Manipal ProLearn’s Post Graduate Certificate Program in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning aims at equipping students and professionals with the most up-to-date industry skills. Go out there and get upskilled with the best AI and DL training to beat the bots in the long run. 

Written By

Saheli Roy Chowdhuri