Artificial Intelligence in employment sectors: There has been a lot of buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI and how they are going to replace humans in different sectors of employment. Although there is no consensus on how much these new technologies will be feasible and dependable, the noise has been growing louder on their efficiency and effectiveness. 

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Meanwhile, Generative AI produces new content, chat responses, designs, synthetic data or deep fakes whereas traditional AI focused on detecting patterns, making decisions, honing analytics, classifying data and detecting fraud, as per TechTarget.

ICICI Securities recently hosted the management of Happiest Minds Technologies to discuss the impact of Generative AI on the IT services industry. The brokerage, in its note released on June 24, shared top highlights from the meet. 

Here're the notable ones - 

  • Generative AI is likely to have the highest impact on BPO and customer support in the near term: BPO is the first area to be impacted by Gen AI technology as there is higher scope for automation in back-end and middle-office business processes. Customer support in the form of chatbots is another area that has massive scope for improvement with the use of Gen AI vs being able to answer only a pre-defined narrow set of problems currently.
  • Productivity improvement because of Generative AI may result in an increased volume of work rather than a reduction in jobs: Productivity improvement by leveraging Generative AI can range between 10-70% depending on the complexity of the task with high productivity improvement for easier tasks (example: Creating simple 4-5 pages’ website using PHP). Productivity improvements because of previous technology disruptions have not led to a reduction in jobs, as the employees can be up-skilled and can be deployed for catering to the increased scope of work. Similarly, the use of Generative AI is unlikely to reduce jobs but increase the scope of work, as per HM management.
  • Generative AI can evolve from being a horizontal solution to verticalised solution: For evolution in SaaS software, more vertical-focused Generative AI can evolve wherein AI models are trained on industry-specific data and relevant context.
  • In the initial phases of experimentation and POCs, clients may outsource to IT services providers because of a lack of skilled talent in Generative AI.
  • Client’s eagerness to adopt Gen AI will create more opportunities in cloud, data and other applications of AI for IT services companies: Happiest Minds’ management believes the shift to Gen AI will create more opportunities in areas that are enabling Gen AI technologies such as data migration to public and private cloud adoption, data curation, managing data governance and security. For example, in the initial phases of deploying Gen AI solutions, 30-40 resources may be required for work around data platforms and only 6-7 data scientists skilled in Gen AI.

Key challenges in adoption of Gen AI

Key challenges in the adoption of Gen AI at the enterprise level are managing data security and governance. Currently, only two Gen AI platforms are available for software developers for testing and improving their codes – 1) ChatGPT browser of OpenAI and 2) GitHub (Microsoft-owned company) and both these platforms' code is required to be shared on these platforms. Therefore, many clients may not be comfortable if their IT services vendors use these Gen AI solutions for code testing.

Examples of Gen AI applications in different industry verticals

  • Edutech – Students can leverage AI-based tutors for one-to-one doubt solving and the creation of highly customised flashcards based on the student’s learning curve. ChatGPT 4.0 is able to converse reasonably well in degree-level subjects as well with ~95% accuracy.
  • BFSI – Gen AI and large language models can be leveraged for automating certain tasks in financial analysis and investment research. It can also be used in regulatory and compliance-related work.
  • Healthcare – There is a huge amount of textual information around patient treatment, both structured and unstructured data which can be digitised and Gen AI can be used to analyse such data.

Source: ICICI Securities report