Over a million Indians move to the US each year, but finding a job can be a tough task. Priyanka Botny found herself in such a situation. Unwilling to give up, she decided on becoming an immigrant entrepreneur and started Playonomics -- an online experiential learning platform for employees to improve their emotional intelligence. Priyanka says often focusing on IT infrastructure takes away attention from employee wellbeing. "We help in bringing that intelligence to build emotional skills, along with digital transformation at organisations," Priyanka explains.

There is, however, a worrying dark side to this potent force. We are increasingly bombarded with news stories on the way machines may threaten jobs -- something that has huge implications for modern capitalist society. Robots are eliminating jobs in factories, warehouses and customer service centres at an accelerating pace. The future of work will be shaped by digital automation, which may open the door to hyper-productive corporations without employees. But with ever-greater AI capabilities, the future could also be one that dispenses with human management.

Artificial intelligence is a powerful agent of change in our society. The debate around how AI will shape our future is ongoing, but one thing is certain: it is already affecting our present – altering the way we work, entertain ourselves and interact with others. As this technology catches on, changing the way we understand ourselves and our society, issues around ethics and regulation are becoming more and more pressing – and increasingly debated. As designers and developers of AI systems, we need to bridge the gap between data technology and human experience. Addressing fairness, accountability and the long-term effects on our society when designing with data will allow us to contribute to the society we want, fostering higher levels of cognitive and emotional skills.

As the world enters the age of the fourth industrial revolution, marked by accelerating innovation and the adoption of automation, the future of work is a fundamental question for the Middle East. While some jobs will be lost and others will be created, nearly all jobs will be transformed. The new reality is one in which 45 per cent of jobs will be automatable by 2030. The automation potential will vary across sectors: jobs requiring repetitive routine work such as manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will see more than 50 per cent of its work done by smart devices. Jobs that require emotional intelligence and creativity such as the arts, health care and entertainment will only see a 29 to 37 per cent automation rate.

Anywhere, at any time, the capabilities and competence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to threaten an employee's role and an employer's style of working. Recent statistics surrounding the correlation between AI and employment in the Capgemini survey reveal that an increasing number of employers are turning to AI devices to heighten their company's impact. For instance, when discussing conversational AI chat bots, 76 percent of the organisations interviewed have seen quantifiable benefits from their voice and chat initiatives, while 58 percent claimed that these benefits met or exceeded their expectations. Compared to last year, the number of consumers using voice has shown a meaningful increase and the report emphasises that customers are increasingly preferring to use voice assistants throughout the consumer journey. To leverage their grasp of consumer appetites, the organisations appear to be trying to find the right balance between human and robotic interactions, but this still threatens the existence of human-based roles in their companies.

With the introduction of new technology, skill in the workplace is significant and since the fourth industrial revolution, adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) marks an acceleration over the shifts of even the recent past. The requirement of skills, for instance, technological, social and emotional skills which are in demand as well as physical and manual skills, will drop at the modern workplace. These changes will require employees to develop their existing skill sets to the expected level or acquire new ones. Companies need to think how work is organised within their organisations with the latest technological changes. How do workforce skills change with automation?

Artificial intelligence systems excel at collecting and processing data, but humans, blessed with the innate skills of understanding context, managing interpersonal relationships and having intuition, remain invaluable, said panelists Thursday at the AI.now workshop, hosted by Fractal Analytics. Advanced AI systems are unable to explain how they make decisions -- which means humans also will be needed to supervise. "You don't just need people to build AI systems, but you also need people that know how to work with that black box, that have intuition and understand the outcome," Dennis Becker, director of global data science at Visa Inc., said at a panel event about AI and the future of work. Many firms and analysts say the big value in AI comes when it's paired with human workers, in what's known as "AI augmentation." In 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity, according to forecasts from Gartner Inc. IT executives at companies such as Nasdaq Inc. have said they're developing AI systems that will help analysts write portions of financial reports, freeing them up to spend more time providing deeper context and advising clients.

The average worker of the future is a socially adept leader, entrepreneur, and life-long learner with transferrable technology skills, who is also happy to work in a team, suggests a new McKinsey report. Chris Middleton looks at whether organisations can really find such people. Reports about the growing IT skills gap in digitally enhanced organisations have been circulating for as long as the internet has existed as a business tool, suggesting that the supposed urgency of fixing the problem has not been an impediment to many successful organisations. However, a new report from management consultancy McKinsey suggests that the rapid introduction of automation and artificial intelligence systems within companies is changing the very nature of work itself, as technologies increasingly augment some human skills, and replace others completely. Over the next decade, this will force companies to reconsider how work is organised internally.

A recent survey of 1,200 executives across the financial services industry by Accenture finds 74% of executives see artificial intelligence reshaping their industry. The report's authors, lead by Ellyn Shook, estimate that between 2018 and 2022, banks that invest in AI and human-machine collaboration at the same rate as top-performing businesses could boost their revenue by an average of 34 percent and their employment levels by 14 percent. But it takes investment in people – AI is taking over many tasks, but skilled people are needed to either create or train these systems, or to augment them. Tellingly, there has been precious little movement to provide the right training to bring these skills about with the current workforce. The Accenture survey finds only three percent plan to significantly invest in re-skilling the people in their workforces for this AI-driven future.

A recent survey of 1,200 executives across the financial services industry by Accenture finds 74% of executives see artificial intelligence reshaping their industry. The report's authors, lead by Ellyn Shook, estimate that between 2018 and 2022, banks that invest in AI and human-machine collaboration at the same rate as top-performing businesses could boost their revenue by an average of 34 percent and their employment levels by 14 percent. But it takes investment in people – AI is taking over many tasks, but skilled people are needed to either create or train these systems, or to augment them. Tellingly, there has been precious little movement to provide the right training to bring these skills about with the current workforce. The Accenture survey finds only three percent plan to significantly invest in re-skilling the people in their workforces for this AI-driven future.