With half of its population under 25 and the unemployment rate at four-decade high, India faces an uncertain future. The question on young people’s minds: what kinds of jobs will we have? Quartz asked leaders across India’s biggest industries about that one job in their company or field that will be the most crucial in the coming decades.
Job cuts have become the new normal in the Indian tech industry. From Paytm to Ola, and Cognizant to Infosys, startups and industry giants alike have been laying off staff in the past year. Despite the churn, the startup sector is poised to create 125,000 direct jobs and 400,000 indirect jobs by 2025. The net impact of automation on jobs is unclear. While the Indian staffing federation expects 3 million jobs to be added around AI, machine learning, IoT, data science, analytics, big data, blockchain and augmented reality, experts estimate only 10 new jobs for every 100 labour-intensive roles that AI replaces.
Naveen Tewari, the founder of mobile marketing platform InMobi, told Quartz:
The one job that’s crucial to all the businesses in the InMobi Group today and in the future is the role of the data scientist. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the core of each of our businesses—our marketing cloud business, for example, uses AI and machine-learning techniques to target the right audience for ads. Currently, we provide over 1.5 billion mobile users with 8 billion ads daily. We have an artificial intelligence-driven platform called Glance that displays personalized visual and interactive content every time a user wakes up their lock screen. Data management platform TruFactor’s patented anonymization offers intelligence based on users’ mobile data for data scientists. The major challenge for hiring is that there is a greater demand for data scientists than people who can fill those roles. Making this role location agnostic allows us to recruit from a global pool of data scientists and helps us solve this resource crunch.