Automation may slash 35 per cent low-skilled jobs in IT, BPO sectors by 2022

New Delhi: If you are also among those low-skilled workers in the Indian IT and BPO industry, you should start looking for other career options as according to a survey, the number of such employees is likely to see a decrease of 35 per cent by 2022.

As per a report submitted by US-based firm Hfs Research, the rising adoption of automation and artificial intelligence will lead to job crisis in these sectors.

The report claims that a total of 2.4 million low-skilled workers in these sectors in 2016 would remain only 1.7 million in 2022.

"The next five years we can manage, it’s the five after that when the impact on labour becomes much more challenging," Phil Fersht, CEO and chief analyst of HfS Research said.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) had earlier stated that their employees need to "re-skill or perish" keeping in view the challenges arising due to automation.

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Nasscom had earlier said that more than 40 per cent of the 3.9 million IT workers in the country would require being re-skilled in next five years for them to keep their jobs.

Defining the skills that would be able to fetch jobs in future, Nasscom mentioned big data analytics, cloud and cyber-security services, internet-of-things, among others.

It also asserted that its member firms including TCS, Infosys, Accenture, Genpact were holding a skills development programme that would be aimed at training employees across all levels.

"This skilling/ re-skilling initiative will translate into 1.5-2 million people working on next-gen technologies in India within 4-5 years," it had said.

According to the report, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is merely accelerating the elimination of rote jobs (routine jobs). “The emergence of RPA is eventually going to sound the death knell for most high-throughput, high-intensity jobs, as both service providers and enterprises master the ability to apply these technologies effectively,” it said.

In February, former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka had said: “… all you have to do is walk into any one of our floors at any company in the IT BPO industry and it becomes starkly clear as you walk around the floor that a huge number of these jobs are going to go away…”