BT AI Summit 2025: AI will change jobs, not take them away, says KPMG's S Sathish amid job loss fears

S Sathish, Partner & National Leader - Industrial Manufacturing, KPMG in India, said that artificial intelligence is not going to take away jobs but is, in fact, going to change the nature of their jobs to make them more efficient. He added that there is a sense of uncertainty and insecurity among employees, especially those belonging to the junior and mid-level, about their future.

"AI is going to change their job, not take away the job, but make them more efficient, make them more [focused] on more value-added jobs is a communication which is clearly very, very important," Sathish said at the Business Today AI Summit 2025. 

He added that the leadership needs to have solid communication with the junior and mid-level employees to allay their fears and doubts and guide the junior and mid-level employees about reskilling and upskilling.

Furthermore, he mentioned that the leadership needs to be coached to handle the changed management style more effectively. He added that things are not moving forward because of miscommunication between the top management and the middle and operating management. 

"Maybe the top management [wants] things to be done, but the middle management and operational management still want to know what will happen. There are so many queries that need to be addressed." 

Meanwhile, Deepak Ng, MD India, Dassault Systèmes, said that organisations are seriously considering how they want to implement AI and have ideas or how they want to take advantage of it. 

"Most of the organisations are actually keeping some realistic budget, not just to kind of have AI just for the sake of having it, but to look at how do I improve my efficiency. Cost, automatically, it will reduce, but by reducing the efficiency, what they are looking at is how do I look at more products in a year, more releases in a year," he said. 

He mentioned that, unlike a decade back, a car launch is as frequent as an iPhone launch nowadays. "Every 4 years, a car is not acceptable because cars have become like an iPhone or a phone or something where everybody wants to change every alternate year." 

Moreover, Saju SR, Sr VP - Smart Power Division, ABB India, said that the adoption of AI is based on the concept of the iceberg of ignorance, i.e., 92 per cent of the information doesn't reach the top management. 

"The question is, do they really need that 92 per cent? So what we are looking at is the AI system converting that information into an insight and providing it to us. For example simple thing is that any business's main purpose is to make a profit, so where are the leakages happening? Rather than people measuring it, the system measures it," he explained.