The AI age requires upskilling on the part of employees to adequately take advantage of the opportunities it has to offer
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution that has been unleashed by the rapid proliferation of Generative AI (GAI) is set to fundamentally alter the structure of the global economy and labour markets. This holds true for India as much as it does for the rest of the world. Like the earlier industrial and internet revolutions, AI also holds the potential to cause disruptions in some areas of the job market, while augmenting human capabilities in other areas and creating new job roles that didn’t exist before. LinkedIn’s data indicates that AI will impact every sector of the economy, albeit to varying extents depending on the industry. The very nature of GAI enables it to efficiently undertake time-consuming routine tasks, allowing human workers to improve their productivity, and signalling a shift from a task-based workforce to a skills-first workforce. Most job roles and skills can be enhanced by leveraging GAI, with only 500 among 41,000 tracked skills being potentially replicable by GAI. The positive benefits of GAI are also reflected in recruiters placing greater emphasis on AI skills and a doubling of AI job role postings on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s data indicates that AI will impact every sector of the economy, albeit to varying extents depending on the industry.
‘AI skills’ here refer to not just one of the core 121 hard AI skills like machine learning and natural language processing but also complementary soft skills like problem-solving, communication, and critical thinking — skills which are inherently human and fundamentally irreplaceable. As GAI becomes adept at executing specific tasks, it is these soft skills that are seeing a significant rise in demand, with professionals possessing these skills being 13 percent more likely to be promoted than those with only hard skills. Therefore, to adequately take advantage of the opportunities AI will provide, it is necessary for any economy’s workforce to be adequately skilled in both hard and soft skills so that they can balance AI skills with people skills.
Notably, India’s workforce is already well-positioned to take advantage of the AI revolution,
particularly in hard skills. India has the highest relative AI skills penetration rate globally, as seen by the fact that Indians are three times more likely to use GAI than other nationalities, and accounts for one of the fastest-growing AI talent pools in the world. India’s youth, particularly GenZ, is also rapidly upskilling itself to retain a competitive edge in the job market. Not to mention, India’s start-up ecosystem has already demonstrated its ability to leverage emerging technologies for novel uses, including AI.
However, LinkedIn’s data also highlights three specific predicaments that need to be overcome to ensure a more equitable and sustained distribution of AI’s economic benefits.
First, we are entering an age of continuous skilling, where workers must acquire and enhance their skills rapidly and constantly to keep up with evolving technologies and avoid becoming obsolete. Importantly, the majority of these skills that will become necessary in the near future are soft skills that are industry- and sector-agnostic. This will challenge the traditional model of higher education and career progression, where industry-specific hard-skill degrees were enough to ensure economic and career mobility. Recognising this, a majority of companies (76 percent) already support their employees in upskilling. Notably, LinkedIn itself helps professionals find new career opportunities through its Generative AI Professional Certificate. However, for a labour market of India’s size and diversity, it is necessary to develop some baseline core GAI and GAI complementary soft skills across the labour spectrum to fully capture the technology’s economic benefits.
We are entering an age of continuous skilling, where workers must acquire and enhance their skills rapidly and constantly to keep up with evolving technologies and avoid becoming obsolete.
Second, the few job roles that GAI is likely to disrupt in the short term are those which require advanced degrees and are generally high-paying. This is an unprecedented economic development, where the upper-end of the economic strata will be more affected than the lower-end by technological change, unlike what was seen in the past technological revolutions, which predominantly affected the lower end of the labour spectrum. This suggests that in the immediate future, India’s IT workforce — the backbone of its middle class and economic story — is likely to be impacted by increased adoption of GAI, potentially causing some economic hiccups if not mitigated early. This is also borne out by LinkedIn’s data, which shows that the technology, information and media industries are the most likely to be disrupted by GAI. It is the same cohort with advanced degrees who are also best placed to make use of the opportunities to upskill themselves, provided adequate upskilling opportunities exist, as they already possess some baseline technical competencies.
Third, GAI is likely to asymmetrically impact the labour market along gender lines. Not only are women more likely to be impacted by the change in the nature of jobs that AI will bring, but they are also less likely to have the necessary skills to take advantage of new opportunities. While this is not unique to AI and is symptomatic of a larger structural gap in the tech industry, it is a special point of concern for India since women’s labour force participation in the country has traditionally been lower than in similarly placed economies. According to LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Data, only 25.6 percent of the AI talent is female. It is, therefore, vital to create opportunities for women to obtain the necessary AI skills to take advantage of the AI wave.
The Skill India Mission could include modules on GAI skills along with critical soft skills to empower the majority of India’s workforce to thrive in an AI future.
These concerns can be alleviated with specific policy initiatives. For instance, the Skill India Mission could include modules on GAI skills along with critical soft skills to empower the majority of India’s workforce to thrive in an AI future. Alongside, programmes that introduce GAI to high school and undergraduate students at an early age would be helpful not only in helping them familiarise themselves with the technology and its applications, but also in improving the baseline skill levels of India’s future workforce. A reimagined, flexible education system which emphasises training based on a broad, constantly evolving skills framework and greater industry-academia collaboration would also ensure that the labour force’s capabilities are consistently in line with changing employment requirements. Finally, special emphasis could be put on policies designed to enable accessible opportunities for AI skilling of women and marginalised groups to bridge existing economic gaps.
Importantly, GAI itself could be made a mandatory tool of pedagogy and skills training in India and could be leveraged to dramatically reduce the cost of training and knowledge transfer. GAI can also enable quick and accurate language translation, allowing workers to upskill themselves in the language of their choice and overcome the linguistic barrier that currently exists in cases where some degree of proficiency in English is necessary to upskill.
Evidently, the AI age necessarily requires a shift in thinking on the part of workers and policymakers to adequately take advantage of the flurry of opportunities it has to offer. Such a shift in thinking and action will be best achieved with the help of nuanced data insights on the Indian workforce’s state of readiness when it comes to AI skills vis-á-vis the demand for such skills in the job market.
Aditi Jha is a Board Director & Country Head of Legal & Government Affairs and a member of the leadership team at LinkedIn India.
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