AI dilemma: Indian workers worried about losing jobs to it, but happy to delegate work anyway

While 74 per cent of Indian workers say they’re worried that artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace their jobs, as many as 83 per cent said they would still delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads, according to the Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, released on Thursday.     

The report, titled ‘Will AI Fix Work?’, called this the new AI-employee alliance. Besides, over three in four Indian workers would be comfortable using AI not just for administrative tasks (86 per cent) but also for analytical work (88 per cent), and even creative aspects of their role (87 per cent).   

All Indian creative workers who are extremely familiar with AI indicated that they would be comfortable using AI for creative aspects of their job. Meanwhile, Indian managers are 1.6 times more likely to say that AI would provide value in the workplace by boosting productivity than that it would cut headcount.  

Further, the report pointed out that every employee and not just experts need AI aptitude, and new core competencies such as prompt engineering.   

The data shows that the pace of work has accelerated faster than humans can keep up, and it’s impacting innovation. The volume of data, emails and chats has outpaced our ability to process it all. As many as 76 per cent of Indian workers say they don’t have enough time and energy to get their work done, and those people are 3.1x more likely to say they struggled with being innovative. Within Microsoft 365, the average person spends 57 per cent of their time communicating, and only 43 per cent creating. Moreover, an overwhelming 78 per cent of Indian workers agree that they lack uninterrupted focus during the workday.  

“As the nature of work evolves, AI promises to be the biggest transformation to work in our lifetimes. The next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth, removing the drudgery from our jobs and freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation. The opportunity and responsibility for every organization and leader is to get AI right—testing and experimenting with new ways of working to build a brighter future of work for everyone. This will require not just investing in AI, but also ensuring that every employee has the necessary AI aptitude to thrive in the new world of work,” said Bhaskar Basu, Country Head – Modern Work, Microsoft India.  

The Work Trend Index 2023 surveyed 31,000 people across industries in 31 countries, including 14 markets in the Asia Pacific region, as well as trillions of signals from emails, meetings, and chats across Microsoft 365, plus labour trends on LinkedIn. This includes 1,000 people surveyed in India.