The workplace underwent a tremendous change last year – more than one could have bargained in decades. Overnight, workspaces shifted home and meetings became virtual. Getting access to a vaccine might take some time, but the events of last year have definitely set the ball rolling for a new normal, and may have changed the workplace for the foreseeable future.

Even before COVID19 upended our lives, there were stirrings of change within job roles. Automation technologies were beginning to gain popularity, as organisations began to embrace AI to do the more mundane tasks, while allowing employees to make their time worthwhile at the workplace, and engage themselves in more fulfilling job roles. In an interview with INDIAai, Vijay Navaluri, COO and cofounder of Techforce.ai noted that a modern day employee seeks more satisfaction from his work, and being saddled with run-of-the-mill work that is time-consuming was just not enticing anymore. Techforce.ai develops a suite of plug-and-play services that can execute these regular jobs, and enable employees in organisations to get involved in more cerebral activities, and utilize their intelligence to further the organisation’s success.

Seemingly, automation is the low-hanging fruit in achieving this pipedream of Future of Work – which is a fairly loose concept that essentially looks at how the future workplace will look like with the infusion of technologies like AI. Ever since AI started becoming popular, there were concerns initially of how AI would take away jobs and leave millions jobless. That adage has undergone a fair bit of refinement over the years – the immense potential and utility of a technology like AI and its subsets cannot be undermined. From drug therapy to traffic management, there are a plethora of sectors AI finds value in. Like most new age technologies, AI enjoys the benefits of economies of scale, making it easily scalable at a marginal cost. However, we’re still in initial stages of exploring the complete range that AI has to offer. While today’s AI has achieved impressive strides in specific intelligence, the cornerstone of AI will be the day it can master general intelligence. AI is of course, as good as the data it is fed. Currently, the more mundane tasks surrounding work can be easily offset to an AI, paving the way for employees to be more present and involved in their roles. But as machines work alongside man, more data will be generated, allowing machines to learn better, faster and make lesser mistakes. Hand-holding machines is still necessary, but we may be less further from complete autonomy than we would like to believe. A black swan event like COVID19 may have just precipitated that pace of growth.

The old adage, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, has never been truer for companies than in 2020. With little time to prepare, and wary of the effects of a global pandemic, organisations shifted to a remote working model overnight. Despite initial hurdles, the transition to a remote model was surprisingly effective. Business Process Outsourcing – one sector that thrives on interpersonal equations and interactions – was quick to adopt remote tools, and utilize AI for virtual front end and back end process management. Within a few weeks of lockdown in India, the country’s IT-BPM sector witnessed a 92% recovery rate. Keshav Murugesh, Group CEO of WNS, which is one of India’s largest BPM companies, said there will be newer and more agile models of engagement, and versatile compensation models for contractual roles and gig workers.

While India’s tech industry seemed to rise to the challenges posed by COVID19 competently, it’s taken other sectors like manufacturing, governance and healthcare a lot longer to make the switch. We still have millions of healthcare workers, law enforcement officials, frontline workers and factory workers going to work, exposing themselves to the virus and taking huge risks everyday, as they wait for a vaccine. The true capability of AI would be to help these workers minimize their levels of risk. In the past year, we saw a surge in telemedicine and factory automation, but not necessarily a trigger response to a pandemic. Instead, this is the direction industries like healthcare and manufacturing should be heading, removing bottlenecks in supply chain management, streamlining existing processes, redirecting strained resources and improving overall efficiency – and all this can be accomplished with AI.

Instead of employing dozens of factory workers in hazardous conditions, AI could be deployed more effectively to offset the level of risk humans are exposed to and find ways to re-engage these workers within a factory. As India’s might as a vaccine manufacturer is put to the test, our collective strength as a technology innovation hub in Asia too could be tried – by cracking how best to utilize technologies like AI and ML for safe and organized disbursement of a vaccine to every part of the country. We have a limited number of doctors, nurses, radiologists and specialists to treat 1.3 billion people – but there are gaps in healthcare delivery that can be effectively addressed using AI.

The future of work isn’t just pertaining to the select few who sit in the comfort of homes, with high speed internet like you and me. It is also for the millions of unsolicited employees in factories, hospitals, government offices and more who deserve a chance to be part of this new normal, and new future.