Humans will hold supervisory positions in the AI age

Growing talks around the use of agentic AI have sparked concerns about the technology’s impact on hiring and the nature of work for human employees. Companies like Service Now and Hinduja Global Solutions say that AI will not take away jobs, but leaders agreed that AI agents can carry out lower level functions leaving humans in more supervisory positions.

Speaking to businessline, Amit Zavery, Service Now Product VP, talked about how human employees can use agentic AI to carry out grunge work.

“Humans agents can act as humans on the loop versus humans in the loop. This means they’re really overlooking things. Think about it like an AI control tower, which orchestrates the operation of all these AI agents and oversees all the work. The human agents are part of that process, the handoff, integration, the oversight, all can be where human agents are participating,” said Zavery.

Similarly speaking about how AI agents can alter the nature of work, Venkatesh Korla, President and CEO, HGS Americas, said that he expected 60 per cent of the work in customer care centres to be automated. It may be mentioned here that at last year’s NVIDIA Summit, Jensen Huang had said that AI can only do 20 per cent of the tasks that a human can do.

Elaborating on his statement, Korla said, “If you look at the type of activity that happens in a contact center, in that particular context, 50-60 per cent of the conversations are primarily read and relay interactions which are rule-based. Over time, with business process outsourcing, we have actually made customer service be very rule-based. Those rule-based procedures can easily be AI-driven. What will not be able to be turned into AI-work would be the empathy and the human-level problem-solving type activity.”

AI can make 30 per cent jobs redundant

Hiring companies at events like the Mumbai Tech Week are now prioritising candidates that have AI and ML skills. One talent acquisition head at the event spoke about how he expected an AI-infused workforce where humans will not be involved in the mundane work. He gave the example of how assignments that used to take three employees 4-6 weeks to complete are now carried out by an AI agent in 10 minutes with only one person required to whet the final output. As such, he estimated that what required 100 people before will only require 70 people in the future due to AI.

This estimate goes against many claims made by company leaders about AI being a job creator. An earlier prediction made by Service Now in November 2024 had claimed that AI will generate 2.73 million new jobs by 2028. When asked about this estimate, Zavery said, “We definitely stand by the growth estimates for AI related jobs. Prompt engineering didn’t exist a few years ago and now everybody has to do it in engineering work. New jobs are being created for labeling and testing AI outcomes.”

For this to become a reality in India, Zavery called for more investment to help universities in making their students proficient in technologies like large language models, AI testing, product engineering.