Can we move away from fear of losing jobs to AI, ChatGPT? Meesho’s Founder & CTO suggests how

While the technological advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT, have made the world a more exciting place to live, it has also made it difficult to move away from the fear of losing jobs. A recent report by Goldman Sachs stated that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.
 
Is there a way to not let the fear of technology driving away jobs get to you?
 
“We should start focusing on upskilling employees,” Sanjeev Barnwal, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Meesho told Business Today.
 
Barnwal also told BT that AI providing solutions is an opportunity for companies to look into other problems and then develop diversified tools to solve them as well. 
 
Take Meesho for example. Barnwal shared a post a couple of weeks back on how taxonomy tagging has reduced the time taken to find attributes of a particular product on its platform. Meesho is an e-commerce company that helps small businesses and women entrepreneurs sell their products online. The company presents approximately eight lakh products for selling on its website with over 6,000 sub-categories.
 
Taxonomy tagging refers to the process of tagging or organising different products on a platform.  
 

The entrepreneur shared how initially, manually sorting products was leading to a lot of wastage of resources and time. “Among all product pictures uploaded by suppliers, finding the right ones and showing them to the customers has been a challenge,” he noted.
 
For instance, if a customer wants a red patterned saree, how will the platform show her the best options without manually selecting different filters? Moreover, the cost of things not going right is way too high, “If this step is not done right, it leads to loss of a customer and then revenue directly," he added.
 
But ever since taxonomy tagging came into place, Meesho has been able to show the right attributes cutting across different categories such as colours, designs, cuts, patterns, etc. Moreover, today, about 250 AI models are at play which singularly focus on inferring attributes.
 
Apart from a considerable reduction in time, it has also resulted in cost optimisation. “The same process happens at a 50 per cent lesser cost using taxonomy tagging,” Barnwal noted. He also said that with this problem solved, their tech team can look at deploying AI to solve other concerns of the customers.
 
He added that taxonomy tagging is just one example of the innovation happening at Meesho. Some of the other themes and tools they are looking at include Generative AI, image-oriented AI tools, and models, among other things. 
 
“Earlier you needed a photographer to enhance an image. Now technology does it for you,” he says. 
 
The end goal, Barnwal says, is to enhance consumer experience as much as possible. “AI is a big revolution. It is as big as the introduction of mobiles. But everything hinges on how to use this technology?" he said.

Also Read: Apple has created more than 1 lakh direct jobs in India in the past two years: MoS IT