In the Lead with Ashok Krish

In the Lead with is a conversation with industry leaders on key trends and leadership challenges. In this issue, we spoke with Ashok Krish, who heads the Advisory and Consulting unction of the AI.Cloud unit at TATA Consultancy Services (TCS). Here we discuss navigating the evolving landscape of AI, remote work and the challenges ahead.

Ruchin Kansal
Ashok, you lead the future of work practice at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)?

Ashok Krish
I lead consulting and advisory services related to AI data, and the future of work practice is a part of that.

Kansal
How do you characterize the future of work, and what timeline do you look at for it to be actionable for your customers?

Krish
The future of work has been a topic I have been speaking about for a decade. The thematic focus of the future of work conversation has changed three times over the last 10 years.

The future of work concept started becoming a thing around the time when the new generation of consumer tools such as iPhones and social media were appearing in the consumer world. People joining the workplace found the enterprise environment fragmented and information not easily accessible. They wanted the same experience in the workplace as they were getting with their consumer devices. At this time the conversation was not about HR and policies, it was about the workers wanting technology that worked — technology to find information more easily, to collaborate, to create. That was the first wave.

The second wave centered around the COVID-19 pandemic era. For the first time, the conversation pivoted away from technology to what does the term “work” mean. Is it about presenteeism — the concept of working while sick. Is it about being in the office or is it about outcomes? How should I create interdisciplinary teams? Companies were able to hire more diverse people in more places. While there were problems with creating integrated value systems, creating empathy, creating mentoring cultures, all the advantages you get to being in-person, remote work has been fantastic from a diversity and career flexibility standpoint. During this wave, change management and culture became a far more important conversation about the future of work, and we finally initiated a shift away from the 100-year-old industrial mindset about work — that happens in a physical plant.

The third wave of conversation about the future of work has just started: designing companies for AI.

Kansal
What are the key trends that are shaping the future of work? Do they differ by geography?

Krish
The geopolitical situation is one. I see a broader switch towards a more insular, localized world where the political incentives to stay in power will be towards populism, insularity and anti-globalization. And it is my opinion that unless people In the Lead with stop consuming social media, it will only get worse.

The second dimension is the fact that 20-year-olds are now coming into the workplace using multiple AI tools to do their jobs, are expecting to work remotely and have an activist mindset. For example, I tried to hire an AI engineer who said yes but demanded conditions in the contract such as “I will only work in the office twice a week. I will not work for oil and gas companies.” I see ethical issues becoming center stage with this generation.

The third dimension is that we have five generations in the workplace, where the distinction is largely about age, but also digital savvy. Behavior extremes are a very hard thing for companies to deal with right now. For older generations, the preferred style of working is that of people coming together, using their brains and doing it right. Versus the younger generation that is growing up with AI and have a mindset that they will only learn things that the AI doesn’t know. So, we’ll continue to have this interesting debate of how you do what you do?

The fourth one is what we value in the talent of the future. For example, how would we conduct employee interviews a year from now? Are we going to give candidates a hard problem and tell them to use whatever tools they want and judge them based on how smartly they were able to prompt the AI? And two, what human value were they able to add on top of that response? And in that scenario, would the name of the college one went to have any value?

Kansal
What is the most significant transformation in terms of the future of work that you see five years from now? Ten years?

Krish
Assistance is already happening. For example, we are using ChatGPT to respond to emails, or create marketing content, with certain levels of accuracy rate, which is getting better over time. I think the true value for organizations will be realized when they can start to also use their enterprise information in improving productivity of employees.

Augmentation is partially underway, and we should start to see more by the end of this financial year. Augmentation means that AI will be used to do simple, repetitive tasks that are part of the workflow while humans focus on more complex tasks. Tasks such as number-crunching, data analysis, etc. At the same time, not all forms of cognitive work inside enterprises are built the same way, so generative AI will be good at making some people productive but not others. For example, United Airlines already has autonomous agents that can create vacation itineraries based on your preferences — budget, diet, likes, dislikes, etc. However, if I was a claims adjuster looking to adjust a claim faster, that’s a harder question for generative AI, unless you truly architect it in a way that it is not hallucinating and giving you wrong advice.

There are pilot programs going on, and we will discover that impact will be asymmetric for different value chains. It will depend upon the nature of knowledge, its concentration and the tacit knowledge that does not exist in your system logs and your process maps or your documents. I think we’re going to figure it out slowly and take advantage where AI can help, but we do have to be patient about how we can get advantages. That said, it will also make some people entirely redundant, for example, low-grade creative work may entirely be replaced by the likes of Dali.

Complete value chain reimagination will take another two to three years. We will start to see some examples within a year or so, but the true game-changing impact is a few years away.

We will start to see smaller, completely distributed autonomous organizations in the next five years. The big ones will take a little bit more time.

Kansal
What about the most significant disruption in how we work today versus 10 years from now?

Krish
I think from a future work standpoint, the difference between a productive employee and a nonproductive employee in the AI era is going to become 1,000 times more pronounced. The bell curve will now be this peak with no middle and with a very long tail, meaning that you’re going to have some employees who are just a thousand times more productive than your worst employees, and you’ll have many employees who really don’t have much to do. What this means is that a company that is AI native can run a distributed autonomous organization with a small number of people who are AI augmented.

The downside: security and privacy. The number of incidents has already gone up substantially and will continue to increase. Security incidents and privacy violations are the cost of going too fast. But the cost of going too slow is that your competition will leave you behind. Therefore, it’s going to be a very interesting time. We will start to see a sweet spot that large companies adopt so that they continue to embrace these new changes without paying billions of dollars in fines.

I also foresee a lot of the skills that make a good CIO or a good CFO or a good CEO or a board member change. I see AI as a core competency in these roles. I can also foresee one board seat held by AI, which may not have the voting right, but have a perspective to inform the board’s decision-making. I think it’s only a matter of time.

I think the biggest elephant in the room is the energy transition away from a fossil fuel-powered world. Currently our global supply chains and businesses are built around fossil fuels. However, a shift to new sources of energy would mean that energy is probably going to be produced locally, become far more distributed and more cost sustainable. This may give rise to new manufacturing practices, new trade balance, a new world order and demand a new skill set. The honest answer is that while it’s easier to predict the impact of robotics and AI on the future of work, it is very, very hard to predict what the green transition will do.

Kansal
Do you see commonality when you look at the future of work across industries? Or do you see significant differences?

Krish
Travel is an industry where the IT maturity is high, and all companies are cloud native. This is where we will see more rapid integration of AI, like the travel agents we discussed earlier.

It will be harder to integrate AI in financial services where there is a lot more regulation, and many legacy companies’ technological environment is messy and complicated as they embraced technology much earlier and therefore have a lot of legacy systems. At the same time, it’s going to look very different for a bank in India though, because they don’t have legacy systems but state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure because they started late.

Ultimately, product or service offering, regulation, embedded technology and systems and even geographic location will shape the future of work across industries.

Kansal
What challenges do you foresee for companies as they plan for the next 10 years? What can companies do to make the transition to the future of work as seamless as possible?

Krish
I think we’re in a peak hype cycle right now, and our enthusiasm must be tempered so we can be objective and really see where AI is going to bring value. But eventually, the futuristic end goal is this idea of a distributed autonomous organization, with a core and supporting functions. Some companies will choose a functional way of operating, and some will choose a product-centric model. But increasingly the decision making around technology investments will be more tied to business outcomes. AI will become central to how people work, and the distinction between IT and business will all but disappear. It is going to be remarkably hard for large organizations to adapt to this new reality.

Kansal
What can individuals do to be ready for the future of work throughout their lifetime? What are some of the key skills we as individuals need to learn and adapt?

Krish
I think it’s very hard. I would say prepare yourself for the next two years. Long-term thinking is very risky as the error rate when trying to predict for the next 10 years is going to be very high.

Earlier, the thinking was that I’m going to start work with this company, retire with this company and get a pension. In the technological world, disruptive change happens very rapidly. Smartphones came, the cloud came and then suddenly, the pandemic happened. And now AI is happening. Nanotechnology, personal robotics, computational genomics, personalized medicine, quantum computing are yet to come and will be massive in their impact. And then there is the green transition.

So, I would say that constantly be aware of a) what are the hardest problems that humanity must solve and therefore b) try to be in areas where you’re solving those harder problems. And to that end, I would say that college degrees are meaningless. Rather, focus on picking up the widest possible range of skills on the human-AI capability spectrum.

I think human skill is fundamentally going to be about framing, asking the right questions, curation, assessing and thinking. Thinking through the models, thinking holistically, and thinking about people. I think a doctor will get automated well before a nurse. For example, AI is already way more accurate than a radiologist, and in detecting cancers much earlier. But a nurse operates in a spectacularly diverse, complex, challenging human environment. And the fundamental skill of a nurse is not to give you an injection or your drugs, but to make you comfortable while you’re sick. And in that sense, we all must figure out what that nurse equivalent of the job roles are in in every industry. We need a reevaluation of what are truly hard human skills. And seek those skills to remain relevant.

I would also urge people to truly understand how technology works, not in the sense that learn to code but in the sense that how it can make life easy for you. We are going from a world where a small number of people had the privilege and access to be able to communicate with computers to a world of natural-language computing, which allows you to converse effectively with the computing universe in English or a language of your choice. And therefore, that means that we are now in a unique position to externalize our ideas into a technology or an autonomous agent. That is going to be the single biggest technological skill that one can perhaps learn. I call it strategic laziness. The idea is that anything that you cannot do today that can be done by technology, you figure out a way to get it done.

Kansal
We are a university preparing future employees, thinkers, problem solvers and leaders. What should we be focused on to enable their success?

Krish
One of the greatest advantages of generative AI is that we can use generative AI to learn about generative AI. Much, much harder is to teach people how to appreciate a flower or the deeper meaning of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry.

I would say that we must teach more technology to humanities students and teach a lot more humanities to STEM students.

I think part of the problem of Silicon Valley is that a bunch of people who have no humanities background at all are sitting and designing completely inhuman technological products. We should encourage students to understand the world a lot better, which will help them design products and services far more humanely and humanistically.

Kansal
What did I not ask?

Krish
I’ve been thinking of the inequalities that AI might create in society, a starker world of the haves and have-nots within countries and across the continents. Think of someone working at Microsoft or Google or a person selling vegetables in Africa. I am also worried that AI is going to accelerate the primacy of English in more ways than we thought as right now English is the only language to interact efficiently with AI. That has deep implications on who is going to be employable, global balance of power and the future of work. We will need large language models to be proficient in many languages to prevent the loss of crucial cultural diversity.

Kansal
Thank you, Ashok, for the very insightful discussion on the future of work, the various forces shaping it and how we as individuals can prepare for such a future.

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This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of In the Lead magazine, from Stillman School of Business’s Department of Management and the Buccino Leadership Institute. The bi-annual magazine focuses on leadership perspectives from the field of health care, with content that is curated from leaders across the industry who share lessons learned from real-world experiences.

Categories: Business, Science and Technology