With automation taking place at a much faster pace across industries especially in the tech space, domestic software firms that employee over 16 million are set to slash headcounts by a massive 3 million by 2022, which will help them save a whopping $100 billion mostly in salaries annually, says a report. The reason for this is advancement in tech space points, according to Bank of America’s report.
Robot Processing Automation will replace human resources to a large extent and this will have a cascading impact on low-skilled workers in BPO’s as the domestic players are also going for upskilling. As per reports, among 16 million workers in domestic IT circuits, 9 million fall under the category out of which 30% that is 30 lakh low-skilled workers will lose jobs by 2022. According to the Bank of America report, America alone will lose 1 lakh jobs due to RPA.
The domestic IT sector employs around 16 million, of which around 9 million are employed in low-skilled services and BPO roles, according to Nasscom. Of these 9 million low-skilled services and BPO roles, 30 percent or around 3 million will be lost by 2022, principally driven by the impact of robot process automation or RPA.
Robot process automation (RPA) is the application of software, not physical robots, to perform routine, high-volume tasks, allowing employees to focus on more differentiated work. It differs from ordinary software applications as it mimics how the employee has worked instead of building a workflow into technology from the ground up and thus minimising time to market and greatly reducing cost over the more traditional software-led approaches.
Another key reason for the RPA-driven job losses is that many countries that had offshored their work in the past are likely to bring the jobs back to their home markets. Developed countries will also look to increasingly bringing back offshored IT jobs and either use native IT workers or domestic software robots like RPA to secure their digital supply chain and ensure future resiliency of their national technology infrastructure, reasons the report.
Emerging economies India and China will go through technology-driven disruption which will impact 85% of jobs in Kenya and Bangladesh.
Based on average fully-loaded employee costs of $25,000 per annum for India-based resources and $50,000 for US resources, this will release around $100 billion in annual salaries and associated expenses for corporates, the report says. “TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant and others appear to be planning for a 3 million reduction in low-skilled roles by 2022 because of RPA up-skilling.
The writing is on the wall for all professionals; it’s high time to sharpen your skillset and upskilling. As the market is becoming competitive companies are not shying away from opting for tools and processes that could reduce their dependence on humans.
Robots, be it hardware or software, are ready to eat up your job. The only way to survive and thrive is to make yourself prepared for a role that can’t be easily automated or replaced by machines or software tools.
