With the presence of artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more prominent by the day, India is one of the highest penetrators of AI skills, along with US, China, Israel and Germany, a report by LinkedIn found.

According to "Augmented Human Enterprise" — an academic study conducted by Goldsmiths (University of London) and enterprise software provider Automation Anywhere — 71 percent of Indian respondents said their employees used robotic process automation (RPA) and AI-based augmentation to its full potential — the highest proportion for any of the four markets surveyed.

Even though, AI is still in its budding stage, the business and employment service portal has seen its impact in the global labour market.

India, being the fastest-growing economy with the second-largest population in the world, the country has a significant stake in the AI revolution and NITI Aayog had acknowledged in its June 2018 discussion paper titled ‘National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence’.

LinkedIn, in the report said, it found that the AI skills are among the fastest-growing skills, a 190 percent increase from 2015 to 2017, on its platform and the industries with more AI in the workforce are the fastest-changing industries.

The 190 percent increase has been noted by the company by studying and comparing the skills what the hiring firms require from the interested candidates.

AI skills, in the LinkedIn report, are referred to the skills required to create artificial intelligence technologies while AI is, in generic terms, defined as the technology which aims to replicate human intelligence in machines.

Unlike those who criticise AI for taking over jobs and leaving humans unemployed, the platform sees AI as an opportunity for the companies to be innovative and gives a thumbs up to those who are looking to invest in the new technology.

Not only does the software industry, but education, hardware and networking, finance, and manufacturing industries have also seen a rise in the use of artificial intelligence, the report found.

"When it comes to volumes in particular, the education sector stands out as the industry, where the second-highest numbers of core AI skills were added by members in 2017—suggesting that the growth of AI is correlated with more research in the field," the LinkedIn report found.

The rise of the AI usage in the industries, according to the report, were due to the increase in data and programming skills that are complementary to AI, skills to use products or services that are powered by data, such as search engine optimisation (SEO) and lastly, interpersonal skills.

For interpersonal skills, the report found, the rise is not as much as the other two reasons. However, the World Economic Forum's The Future of Jobs 2018 report said that there are ten occupations which can be emerged to AI.

"Globally across all industries, top emerging occupations include marketing specialists and managers, human resources specialists and consultants, and user experience designers," the report said.

In addition, a number of highly automatable jobs fall into the top ten most declining occupations because of the rise in the artificial intelligence in the last five years.

Administrative assistants, customer service representatives, accountants and electrical/mechanical technicians, are the jobs which have been declining because of the rise in AI.

First Published:Sept 19, 2018 4:31 PM IST