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Microsoft acquires conversational AI and bot development firm

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft has announced to acquire a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bot development company XOXCO for an undisclosed sum.

Texas-based XOXCO has been paving the way in conversational AI since 2013 and was responsible for the creation of Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings.

“It also developed Botkit which provides the development tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers on GitHub. Over the years, we have partnered with XOXCO and have been inspired by this work,” said Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI at Microsoft on Thursday.

Conversational AI is quickly becoming a way in which businesses engage with employees and customers — from creating virtual assistants and redesigning customer interactions to using conversational assistants to help employees communicate and work better together.

According to Gartner, “by 2020, conversational artificial intelligence will be a supported user experience for more than 50 percent of large, consumer-centric enterprises”.

The Microsoft Bot Framework, available as a service in Azure and on GitHub, today supports over 360,000 developers.

“With this acquisition, we are continuing to realise our approach of democratising AI development, conversation and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where people communicate,” said Cheng.

Over the last six months, Microsoft has made several strategic acquisitions to accelerate the pace of AI development.

The acquisition of Semantic Machines in May brought a revolutionary new approach to conversational AI.

In July, it acquired Bonsai to help reduce the barriers to AI development by combining machine teaching, reinforcement learning and simulation.

In September, Microsoft acquired Lobe, a company that has created a simple visual interface empowering anyone to develop and apply deep learning and AI models quickly, without writing code.

“The acquisition of GitHub in October demonstrates our belief in the power of communities to help fuel the next wave of bot development,” Microsoft said.

Cybersecurity: Eight Ways You Can Boost Employee Buy-In

Cybersecurity threats are an ongoing problem, and one that’s growing: It’s hard to go a month without some organization reporting a breach or other problems. There were, for instance, more reported instances of data breaches in the U.S. during the first half of 2018 than in all of 2013, according to a report on Statista.

Yet, no matter how extensive cybersecurity measures are, the human element is a regular issue: Specifically, how well employees comply with the new procedures, sometimes handed down from people far removed from the employees’ department, who don’t necessarily understand all the ins and outs of how those employees do their daily work. A well-thought-out plan can go sideways, for instance, if team members ignore some of the steps involved to save time or avoid hassles — something quite possible, if they don’t understand why a task exists in the first place.

So how do you ensure individual buy-in, in order to keep your organization protected against data breaches or other security issues? Below, eight members of Forbes Technology Council share their preferred methods for boosting cybersecurity buy-in, as well as discuss why the approaches work. Here’s what they said:

Make Understanding A Priority

Security and compliance actually have two separate goals. A compliance program should focus on the minimally invasive way to meet all public policy and industry rules to prevent fines or other sanctions. Security is about providing the correct level of protection to make an asset an unattractive target for a criminal. When employees understand the objective and outcome, you create buy-in. – Bret Piatt, Jungle Disk

Lay Out All Of The Facts

It has become abundantly clear in the last 12 months in the world of cutting-edge technology companies, that customer data must be protected and respected to a massive degree. Such behavior does not merely grant your firm a competitive advantage. Rather, it is singularly pivotal to your firm’s very survival in the digital age. Make this fact clear to your teams on day one, and every day after. – Zia Yusuf, Velocity

Clearly Define Policies

Often employees are left guessing “what’s our policy?” The ISO Compliance regime allows companies to clearly define those policies or rules, and then audit. Employees aren’t left guessing, for example, whether they can connect their personal Bluetooth fitness tracker. Employees need to feel good about their role in security, model good behaviors, and to be the sentinels when things don’t look right. – Phil Quade, Fortinet

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Make It An Employee-Managed Initiative

Make cybersecurity an “employee-managed initiative.” Involve them in the “internal security committee” that tracks compliance. Communicate cybersecurity’s importance and the impact it has on the business using terms and language they understand. We use comic book-like imagery and sci-fi and comic language in posters across the office that reinforces the message without being suffocating. – AshwinRamasamy, PipeCandy, Inc.

Demo A Break-In

Typical security procedures seem more like theatre than security, forcing employees through repetitive steps with no clear meaning. One of the best ways I’ve found to get employee buy-in is to demonstrate how vulnerable the company is to security violations. You can do this by having employees attempt to break in themselves, or watch someone else do so. It makes security real to watch it fail. – Sean Byrnes, Outlier AI, Inc.

Read more in The Cybersecurity Maturity Model: A Means To Measure And Improve Your Cybersecurity Program

Create Security Roles

Protecting your company against attacks includes having a reliable team of experts in place who will identify risks in your network and business systems, while proactively creating mitigation strategy. Creating security roles and setting limited access required by each position and educating employees by holding yearly cybersecurity seminars will play a vital role in cybersecurity compliance. – Lana Vernovsky, Dynamics Resources

Illustrate Importance

The best way to improve employee buy-in and compliance on cybersecurity features is to illustrate the importance of these issues. Regular training can help improve your employees’ understanding of company policies and will help to strengthen mutual goals, even through interpersonal differences. – Schieler Mew, CS Design Studios

Make It A Part Of New-Employee Orientation

In our industry, we deal with sensitive customer data, including their bank account information. As part of new-employee orientation, I personally ask all new employees to safeguard this data and explain how our policies and training help us exceed customer expectations on protecting their confidential data. – VinayPai, Bill.com

Rocky 2019 Warned by Middle Real Estate Tycoon

A mogul of Middle East real estate development, Emaar Properties Chairman Mohamed Alabbar, said that the region has plenty of development opportunities despite geopolitical tensions and difficulties doing business. “If I was to look at the region as a whole I’m still positive,” he told CNBC at the Milken Institute MENA Summit in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. However, he cautioned investors to remain prudent in the longer term. “I’m just careful about what is 2019. I’m just worried that we’ve been having a good time for too long. So I just hope that 2019 goes well … So make sure your balance sheet and debt level is at reasonable levels, so if there’s a shake-up you can handle it,” he said.

Emaar Properties is a real estate development company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which is responsible for developments throughout the country and the wider Middle East, and beyond.Founded in 1997, Emaar Properties has been responsible for much of the development of Dubai, including the iconic Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. It has also developed shopping malls and residential property, hotels and entertainment venues. The real estate firm also has developments further afield such as in India and Pakistan. Speaking to CNBC, Alabbar summarized the outlook for the company.

“My view is that Morocco is doing well for us, I would say Egypt is doing extremely well; Saudi Arabia with all the restructuring going on, it’s going to be a fabulous opportunity. In the UAE, we still expect to grow 20 percent on an annual basis,” he said, noting that the company’s growth in India was recovering and Pakistan was doing “reasonably well” for the firm.

Alabbar said the company had achieved around $5 billion of sales in 2017 and close to $1.8 billion of net profit with the company growing around 20 to 25 percent on an annual basis.

“Trust me, the margins, the opportunities and the growth I’ve been having in the Middle East over the last 20 years — even if you make a mistake, it’s so worth it,” he said, although he noted doing business in the wider Middle East had its challenges.

“Of course if I’m doing business in the UAE, it’s comfortable, it’s safe. But if I have to go to Cairo (in Egypt) I have to know the government, I have to know the mayor of Cairo, the mayor of Alexandria. But that’s what we do, that’s what we’re paid for, that’s what we have to do to grow our business,” he said.
The Middle East is certainly not a region for the faint-hearted. There is ongoing geopolitical turbulence caused by the continuing conflict in Yemen, uncertainty in Syria and Iraq about the possible resurgence of terrorist group Islamic State and internal disputes within the Gulf Cooperation Council (with Qatar being sidelined by

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt), not to mention perceived proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Couple these issues with economic instability, prompted by the lower oil price, and there’s a combustive mix for most businesses. Alabbar said it was nothing new, however, and that the region was ripe for real estate development and infrastructure investment.

“I think that what the Middle East is going through is, unfortunately, not new … But the truth is that the opportunities exist — there are millions of people who have to go to school, they have to shop, they have to find jobs and open new factories, there’s tourism, so therefore that will contribute to economic growth in the whole region.”
Asked about Emaar Properties’ balance sheet, Alabbar said there had been difficult times.
“2007, 2008 and 2009 was very painful and I try not to forget the lesson. And I deal with bankers with a lot of respect but when they come and tell me ‘your balance sheet is not very efficient’ I know that I’m doing a good job. So I like to keep my debt at a very reasonable level. Then again, we have to do business, we have to be aggressive but at the same time we have to keep our eye on the cycle.”

Developers, Investors Takes Flight to Industrial Real Estate

Industrial real estate is fast emerging as the go-to asset class for investors and developers, as demand for special economic zones (SEZ) wanes and India’s consumption and e-commerce story gets a boost from the government’s Make in India initiative and the goods and services tax (GST).
In a bid to build industrial, logistics and warehousing parks, industrial clusters and townships, there is a rush to buy land across states, something that hasn’t happened since the SEZ frenzy more than a decade ago. The warehousing and logistics sector, which attracted investments of more than a billion dollars in 2017, is gearing up for the next round which is expected to witness higher interest in building businesses around steady rental income.

At the top of the list is Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc., which has invested in residential and commercial office real estate and is now evaluating opportunities in the industrial space.

“Brookfield is looking to invest in logistics parks. It may invest in a company or buy the facility or park itself,” said a person familiar with the company’s plans, who did not wish to be named.

A Brookfield spokesperson declined to comment.
Scouting for land is on in western India, including Mumbai and Pune, as well as in the national capital region (NCR), Gujarat, Chennai and Bengaluru. Sydney’s LOGOS Group and Assetz Property Group from Singapore, which partnered in 2017 to invest $400 million to build logistics and industrial parks in India, is shopping for land. Ben Salmon, co-founder and chief executive officer of Assetz Property Group, said they are planning to close at least three or four transactions in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

“We have a customer-focused, long-term, annuity model approach where we will build logistics parks which get less rent but are focused on servicing companies, and may also do industrial parks for non-polluting, light manufacturing which attract higher rent and are more specialised,” Salmon said.
Niranjan Hiranandani-promoted Hiranandani Communities is planning to launch a 250-acre industrial park in Talegaon, Pune after it recently got approval for an integrated industrial area. The firm has another 300 acres near Chennai and 77 acres in Nashik.

“It’s a big opportunity for us and we are in it for the long run. India wasn’t ready for this even five years back but with the government’s push to promote manufacturing and GST this is the right time,” said Hiranandani.

Maharashtra’s industrial policy is in fact based on the premise of providing an exit route to developers stuck with SEZs owing to difficulties in land acquisition, changes in tax laws by the central government. Last week, in a major policy bailout for long-stuck Navi Mumbai Special Economic Zone Pvt. Ltd, the Maharashtra government allowed the promoters to convert the 1,842-hectare SEZ into an “integrated industrial township”.

“There was a lot of exuberance around SEZs but not many gained from them due to less demand, more supply leading to the inevitable fall. A lot many things are in order today, making industrial real estate more practical and doable,” said Sanjay Dutt, CEO, operations and private funds, Ascendas-Singbridge India.
Ascendas-Singbridge Group manages 30 million sq. ft of industrial space across Asia-Pacific, and plans to build 15-16 million sq. ft of warehousing and logistics space in India in the next five to six years with Firstspace Realty, jointly investing $600 million. Embassy Industrial Parks Pvt. Ltd, a collaboration between realty firm Embassy Group and an affiliate of Warburg Pincus, is looking to buy land in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi, the sweet spot being 25-30 acres in each city. By March-April, it would have 10 million sq. ft of developable land.

“Buying land is not easy but we are building our business the way Embassy built its office park portfolio. It helps that we are allowed to draw long-term, cheaper debt after the logistics space was granted infrastructure status,” said Anshul Singhal, CEO, Embassy Industrial Parks.
Lodha Group is also planning to develop a 150-acre logistics and value-added industries park in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), as part of its aim to have $1 billion of assets under management by 2021. The location is 45 minutes from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) and half an hour from the upcoming airport in Navi Mumbai.

“We are in the process of finalizing our business plan and partner and expect to start work on the site in the next few months,” said Abhishek Lodha, managing director, Lodha Group.

Mahindra Lifespace Developers Ltd will develop two industrial clusters – 264 acres in north Chennai (with Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Corporation) and 268 acres near Ahmedabad, apart from earmarking 500 acres in Mahindra World City, Jaipur for industrial development and aggregating land outside Pune.
“The larger question is how will manufacturing demand play out in India?” said Anita Arjundas, managing director and CEO, Mahindra Lifespace Developers.

Healthcare Groups Refined the Single-payer System in California

The focus of the testimony was SB 562, a single-payer bill that was approved last year but then shelved. The bill would establish a system by which the state would pay for all healthcare and essentially cut out insurance companies. Taxes would increase, but supporters maintained that would be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums, copays and other costs.

There are some legal hurdles that would make switching to a single-payer system difficult, according to a report from local public news outlet KPCC. The rules that govern the Affordable Care Act, for example, are all federal, so any changes would require negotiation with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

California’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, relies on both state and federal funding, and the feds have the final say. Plus, there’s Medicare: It’s a federal program, so California can’t make changes to eligibility, financing or benefits without a thumbs-up from Washington.

There are also a couple of state laws that would make things thorny — such as Prop 4, a 1979 law that limits how much tax money the state can keep. Above a certain threshold, funds have to be returned to taxpayers, and it would require an amendment to the law to make healthcare exempt.

Supporters of the bill, including the California Physicians Alliance, say it would be worth the effort. One of those supporters, economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told the committee Wednesday that the state would have to raise about $100 million in additional funds to cover the cost of single-payer, but that most in the state would end up paying less for healthcare because insurance-related expenses would be eliminated.

Other supporters include Health Access California, the California Immigrant Policy Center, Small Business Majority and the California Labor Federation.
Opponents of the bill — including the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Medical Association — say there’s no responsible way to pay for a single-payer system.

The committee is expected to produce a report by this spring with recommendations on how to proceed.

Amazon,Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase

The announcement of the healthcare partnership between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase is either the major disruptor everyone in the industry has been awaiting or means little except to the three companies involved. Since the firms have given no indication of what they’re planning, everyone is reading into the collaboration.
Reaction has been like a Rorschach test, Kaiser Health News Chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner said during an America’s Health Insurance Plans forum Tuesday morning. People in the industry are either excited or scared.

“They’re focused on managing cost, also on that patient or employee experience,” said Tracy Watts, a senior partner with Mercer, during Tuesday’s AHIP panel discussion on employer insurance coverage. “Think about how the experience on Amazon is different than how we access healthcare delivery. I look forward to what they come up with. I don’t know if it will be dramatically different.” The Adis Group CEO Lyndean Brick said the whole thing is a mixed bag.
“Some are excited and others think it doesn’t mean anything. I think it’s reasonable to think that payers have to pay attention to this,” Brick added. “There’s the theoretical possibility that this could take insurers out of the system.”

Payers welcome this as an opportunity, according to Miki Kapoor, president and former CEO of the Tea Leaves Health division, which was recently acquired by Welltok.

“Payers are saying ‘it’s a jolt that was needed.’ I believe payers know there is always going to be a role for them. They want to evolve so they remain at the center of care.”
Many in the industry believe Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase will cut out the insurance middleman for coverage for their combined 1 million-plus employees.

Shares of Anthem, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, Humana, Aetna and Aetna’s potential buyer, CVS Health, along with pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts, tumbled after the Jan. 30 announcements before the stock market took a general steep drop on Monday.
Analysts have viewed the $69 billion merger between Aetna and CVS Health as a preemptive strike against what many believed would be an announcement by Amazon that it would enter the pharmacy services business.

Toby Cosgrove, former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic who now serves as an executive advisor, said during a precision medicine conference this fall that the industry was concerned about major forces in the supply chain, notably “Amazon coming at us in purchasing.”
HIMSS CEO Hal Wolf said that, even short of details at this point, the fact that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan have come together to address employer-related healthcare is intriguing.

“Depending on how this new idea gets positioned and where they go with it, the company could have an impact on a lot of health systems that have their revenue driven by payments in this same space,” Wolf said. “That’s why they have to hurry up and get faster with digital health.”
Wolf also said that he anticipates more companies outside healthcare moving to disrupt the industry in interesting ways.
“I don’t expect it to slow down,” Wolf said. “I think we’ll see more and more combinations in the future.”

JPMorgan Chief Executive James Dimon publicly tried to calm fears, saying the deal would only serve the employees of the three firms, according to The Wall Street Journal. But JPMorgan also confirmed that it welcomes others to get involved after JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony said in the same WSJ report that the bank has “had hundreds of phone calls and emails from client CEOs, doctors and healthcare administrators looking to see how they can get involved.”
On a Thursday earnings call, Cigna CEO David Cordani said the deal is “presenting more opportunities than not.”

Cordani talked about the importance of its U.S. commercial employer business as a “very attractive growth opportunity.”
Should the Amazon partnership go in the direction of taking a million-plus lives out of the commercial insurance market, and should it welcome others to get involved, insurers could find they’re covering more higher risk beneficiaries.

Cordani indicated that Cigna has been thinking for some time about the future direction of the health insurance industry, and it’s not the same old model.
“Clearly the announcement was not lost on us,” Cordani said during the call in response to an analyst question on the Amazon call. “So stepping back I think one way we look at the announcement is, it reinforces something we’ve been talking about for quite some time, which is – it’s a pretty dynamic industry and the older orientation around focusing only on insurance or a fee-for-servicehealthcare delivery model is just fundamentally not sustainable as employers and customers demand more.”

That reinforces the imperative of focusing on transparency, alignment and a demonstrable way to drive healthy productive present employees and making the employer’s business better and more effective, he said.

The main threat, or opportunity, presented by the Amazon deal is the ability of the online giant, backed by data and funding, to fundamentally lower the cost of healthcare, and to target insured employees in a personalized, digital way, better and more effectively than traditional providers and insurers.
“If I bought books on Amazon two years ago, they still know what I like and need. I think Amazon is around changing the dynamic,” Pfizer CMO Freda Lewis-Hall, MD, said at the same precision medicine summit attended by Cosgrove.

She likened the industry’s efforts to delivering Star Wars advancement in a Flintstones’ system.
Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway, however, will have the ability to manage employees as patients outside of the four walls of the healthcare system, Kapoor said. They will be able to influence behavior and measure those choices.

But the bottom line is that they chose to do this because they became frustrated with the cost of healthcare, he said. “Healthcare is breaking our economy,” Kapoor said. “I think these titans of industry have said, ‘we’re going to do something about it.'”
Brick said, “They’ve acknowledged they’d have to bend the cost curve. The way to bend it is to take out the middleman. They have the infrastructure. They can have their own little ecosystem, have Amazon deliver drugs to a person’s doorstep. They can buy providers.” The present system is regulated and fragmented to the point that it can’t really innovate, she said. “If we can innovate in an ecosystem like this, I think there may be some good examples that come out of this that are able to be adopted by the rest of healthcare,” Brick said. “I’m excited about this. It’s a public acknowledgment that employers are going to take charge and try and fix the system.”

5 Essential Requisites to Surmount within the IT Sector

Information Technology (IT) sector is one in all the foremost competitive however well-paying industries in Republic of India that employs nearly three million professionals associated generates an annual revenue of roughly $150 billion in keeping with the Indian whole Equity Foundation. Despite the business size and revenue, it remains ferociously competitive amongst professionals for top paying positions.

One of the basic qualities of the IT business is that it evolves apace. Considering this, technologies like massive information, Machine Learning and AI has reworked the lives of the many finish users within the past decade. The speedy evolution of technology demands that professionals operating within the IT sector unendingly upgrade their skills to stay valuable to employers and to outmatch the competition.

The necessity of getting domain experience to achieve this sector makes it essential for current IT professionals to re-skill in domains that ar prized by technical school firms. experience in domains like information Science and internet Development can stay of high price to firms and in keeping with business estimates, there’ll be a inadequacy of over seven million qualified information Scientists and internet Developers globally by 2021.

Some essential traits professionals should absorb and learn to outmatch within the IT sector ar elaborate below:

Proficient in Writing
Professionals, United Nations agency need to achieve success within the IT sector, should knowledge to code well. moreover, IT professionals United Nations agency grasp quite one writing language have a foothold over their peers. Programming languages like Javascript are in abundant demand lately by firms, so having an intensive information of it’s priceless for associate IT skilled.

Expertise in Latest Technologies
To be competitive within the job market, skilled developers should frequently upgrade their skills. 2 of the most recent associated most powerful domains to be a skilled in, are information Science and Mean Stack technology.

Data Science helps firms structure and organize Brobdingnagian volumes of unstructured information. Ancient Business Intelligence tools ar unable to assist analyse giant volumes of such information. It’s calculable that inside a pair of years eightieth of the information collected by organizations are going to be unstructured and can got to be strip-mined victimization data science tools. Information science can facilitate organizations gain substantive insights into the strip-mined information. The goal of information Science is to feature business price to a company. the typical associational beginning earnings for information somebody’s within the U.S. is $120 K whereas in Republic of India an information Scientist could earn an annual package of government agency four hundred,000.
MEAN stack is associate signifier for MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and Node.js all of that ar a group of JavaScript-based technologies wont to develop internet applications and websites. A bonus of MEAN Stack is that each level of associate application is run employing a single language, JavaScript. The convenience of employing a single language on each level of associate application makes JavaScript economical and fashionable within the eyes of gifted internet developers.
Expertise in each these domains are often crucial for a professional’s success.

Knack for Coming up with and Execution of a Project
One of the key skills that firms rummage around for in probable hires is their ability to execute and handle a project. When it comes to an integral part of any company/organization, it becomes of utmost importance that the professionals have an eye fixed towards numerous stages and aspects concerned in it i.e. planning, ideation, management and execution. Thus each skilled should imbibe this ability to be ready to shine on top of the remainder of the ton.

Readiness to Up-skill for Longer Term
The information that the technology business amendment apace is recent hat. Whether or not one has the ability to vary with it or not, ought to be the priority for each skilled.

The advantage enjoyed by several Indian IT firms is beneath threat within the U.S. They need been idlers in adopting digital technologies. Therefore, Indian IT firms have begun to extend their overseas worker count at the expense of native Indian talent.

To outmatch, Indian IT professionals ought to up-skill and learn new technologies like AI, Blockchain, Machine Learning, and therefore the net of Things. For one to sustain within the IT business, operating professionals should become womb-to-tomb students.

Good Communication and Social Skills
Intelligence is very valued in today’s hyper-competitive company atmosphere. Organizations have completed that sensible communication skills are crucial to having the ability to figure seamlessly with shoppers and peers.

Additionally, firms these days need to rent the “leaders of tomorrow”. To do so, high IT firms look on the far side hiring people that have associate experience in an exceedingly specific technology, they appear for people that will work well with alternative professionals and lead a team once needed.
In order to essentially differentiate oneself and outmatch, one should closely endeavor to hone the ability set system inside ourselves.

What to Expect
As technologies grow a lot of subtle, bigger experience are going to be needed on the part of firms to use these technologies and add price. Professionals United Nations agency work on leading edge technology and have the proper skills are going to be in nice demand and shall command higher salaries than those while not the proper skill-set.

Automation: Robots are coming to snatch your jobs

Though a 2013 Oxford study mentioned that almost 50 per cent of all US jobs could be computerised within 20 years, 63 per cent of respondents to a Monster.com survey felt nothing could take away their jobs in the next 50 years or so. This shows that too many people are unaware of the automation wave that is coming soon.

Food service and manufacturing are predicted to be the first job industries which would be taken over by robots and AI for the most part. If some industries get highly automated, the other fields are bound to get affected too. Employees need to re-skill themselves and fast!

“Recently, the Indian banking system has seen the beginning of the revolution. Robots also make burgers and do all kinds of middle tasks, leaving behind only entrepreneurship or a temporary staffing. Artificial intelligence manages investments, handles everything like insurance claims and basic bookkeeping, and performs basic HR tasks,” says Avinash Bharwani, Vice President- New Business, Jetking.

It is your soft skills which will become extremely valuable when AI, automation or robots enter the job market. With the high pace at which new technologies are coming to the fore, we need to ask ourselves whether our work could be done by a robot. And if it can, we need to get worried.

The main jobs which will face a great automation risk include factory workers, drivers, cashiers, waiters and customer service personnel.

Which jobs are safe from automation and robots?
Creative jobs such as those of artists, designers, hairdressers, writers etc are safe as automation cannot replace true creativity Those jobs where humans display their skills such as that of a sportsperson, singer or dancer will be safe as no one would enjoy robots competing against each other or marvel at a completely artificial voice Jobs requiring empathy such as those of counsellors or therapists will be retained by humans. This category could also include to some extent teachers, vets, dentists, fitness trainers, police officers, fire-fighters etc

Jobs where you would need to cater to specific bits of knowledge such as that of tour guides or florists cannot be taken up by robots Jobs which involve creating, maintaining or fixing automation or AI technology would also be safe from robots This shows that while some jobs will be eliminated, many employees will find themselves becoming overseers to AI

Here are a few tips on how you can protect your job from automation and robots:

1. Be aware of how much automation risk you face
Do adequate research in your job field to understand if you should be worried about AI or robots taking over your job. List your skills and check whether any of them could be done by robots. Job skills which deal with people or need you to innovate and come up with new ideas are less likely to be automated. So, focus on enhancing these soft skills to safeguard your job from robots or automation in future.
2. Understand partial automation
It is quite possible that only a part of your job, such as inputting data and info onto spreadsheets, will be automated, which can actually boost your productivity. Often, employees spend a large chunk of their allotted work hours doing menial, routine jobs which do not utilise the human mind adequately. These routine jobs will be dealt with by using automation software, AI and robots. You need to make sure that your top job skills are polished and possess a human touch.
3. Work beyond your job description
To make yourself more valuable to your company, have a decent idea on how the rest of the departments work. Understand the goals of the company and increase your area of expertise so that if your job in under the threat of being taken over by automation, AI or robots, you have other options to bank on.
4. Look for a career move
If per chance you realise that your job will definitely be taken over by robots or automation and there is nothing you can do to change that, start looking for a different job which uses slightly different job skills that cannot be automated. Re-skill yourself accordingly – you can go for short certificate courses or sign up for a free course on Coursera, EdX or yet another MOOC website. Some companies also provide tuition reimbursement to employees looking to skill themselves further.

The automation wave would definitely help push forward human productivity to a great extent and the increasing proliferation of AI and robots is actually a great boon. “Artificial Intelligence is making technology more helpful and intuitive. And this is most evident in the smart-phone market. A phone that can learn your language, count your calories, answer your questions or recognize what a things look like,” says Jetking’s Bharwani.
India and automation

India too needs to join the rest of the world in pushing its way forward in the field of artificial intelligence. “China has progressed in AI-based research; India should also view AI as a critical element of national security strategy. India needs to be prepared for the digitalised future. Establishing AI-ready infrastructure, digital services and digital literacy is thus necessary to prepare India’s jobs and skills markets for an AI-based future. The bold urban initiative by government called ‘Smart Cities’ is also giving a hint to the public to stay ready,” says Bharwani.

The skills, experience and insight that a human being can provide are irreplaceable. Soft skills are the skills of the future. Machines and robots would only be taking over those jobs which are suitable for them.

As Bharwani says, “I believe the time is not far when the robots takeover workplaces and hence it is necessary to know how humans are required to handle them. AI is no more a toddler. Many AI researchers believe that the day will ultimately come. The question is, are humans ready for it?”