Name: EXL CEO: A.I. Will Augment the Workforce, Not Replace It
Uploaded: 2019-11-27
Duration: 6 min 44 s
Description: Rohit Kapoor says that A.I., as well as other new technology, still needs human governance - the key is to focus on re-skilling workers to focus on emerging job sectors.

S S S So Rohit, you so recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Can you tell me about your journey, Business plan for EAX was actually written right on the ground floor of this building in a Starbucks. And today we are here on the 29th floor. So it's really a big accomplishment. The company has grown and built up in size and scale. This quarter we expect to be at a revenue run rate of a billion dollars. We've got 30, 000 employees globally situated and we are very well positioned to be able to move forward into the future. Can you tell us a little bit about what you Excel does so excel in its very basic sense Helps our clients manage their business. Our clients have got a lot of data about their end customers. We help them manage that data, derive insights from that data and take better decisions with that data. And we run and manage business operations for our clients. Nowadays, workers are changing jobs more frequently than they did in the past. Do you think that it's important for companies to still be committing a lot of resources to extensively training their employees? The market is evolving so rapidly, that the new skills that you need to be relevant in the marketplace, Those are changing very, very quickly. And therefore to be able to adapt and be flexible is going to be critically important. There's a big shortage of skills in a number of different areas pertaining to AI and machine learning and data science. And then there's some skills which are becoming irrelevant. A lot of But it will not be a complete replacement and a substitution. A few years back there was, I think, this big fear that automation, AI will completely eliminate jobs and that we might be entering into a period of a jobless economy. We are at a ten year low in terms of the unemployment rate. The skills that are needed for certain critical functions are in absolute scarcity. And there is a very high premium for getting people who've got that talent and that skill set. Could you maybe give us an example of something where AI is creating a position that maybe didn't exist before that you've experienced in your work? So there are a number of different areas, you take a look at cybersecurity. That's an area where there are a lot of new jobs and new roles getting created. Take an issue around facial recognition. Now while you have a machine that will be able to visually recognize individuals The ability to make sure that that does not have any bias in that decision Smaking, that requires human governance on top of that. Since your company helps other businesses implement AI in their operations, how do you make sure that they do that in a responsible way? So a lot of this has got to do with how you foundationally developed some of these algorithms. How do you have mechanisms to be able to cross check and cross validate that there is no bias in the algorithm that's being created, and that you have the transparency and the explainablity with those algorithms, so that you can see the reasoning and you can see the causality that's been created. We have a mechanism of back testing the algorithm that we've created. To see what kind of results it would produce, and we'll compare that with some of the actual decisions that were made. And then we'll see whether there was a bias that has been introduced or not been introduced. Typically, if you have somebody who's immersed into a business, and they themselves are performing the check The independence is lost, and therefore we've got separate teams, that will be able to build a check and balance associated with it. With contemplating creating an ethics committee within the company, so that that can be someone as a body, that can be responsible for overseeing this across the enterprise. So nowadays, a lot of CEOs are speaking out on social and cultural issues. Do you feel that that's the role of the executive to do and if so, are there any issues that you've spoken out on? That is a critical element for a CEO to lead and to be able to drive to the organization? Making sure that its workforce is diverse, inclusive, and is representative of the economic environment around the organization. It's also important for us to be able to carry along our employees. And be able to retrain them, and upskill them and rescale them. We've embraced a school in Delhi And may have them contribute to society. They also have separate programs where people who have graduated from high schools or from college, we will give them vocational training skills. So that they can actually work in a corporate environment. We do work in the Philippians, we do work in South Africa, we do work here in the US We've got multiple programs across the globe where we will be engaging outside of the corporate world. So you recently attended Fortune CEO Initiative Conference and I was wondering if there were any sessions in particular that you found interesting. This was my first time attending the Fortune CEO Initiative Conference and I really loved it. And I particularly enjoyed one of the working groups sessions that we had. As to what can companies do to be able to manage this issue around bias in here? And I took away a number of different things that we at EXL can do in response to that. Is there anything that you might like to see in the conference next year ?>> Talking a little bit more about the future of work as to how humans will work along with technology. How there will be augmentation of analytics in the work that we do. I think those are interesting topics for us to continue to talk about. 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EXL CEO: A.I. Will Augment the Workforce, Not Replace It

Leadership

Rohit Kapoor says that A.I., as well as other new technology, still needs human governance - the key is to focus on re-skilling workers to focus on emerging job sectors.