ET World Leaders Forum: AI pushing companies to redefine work, talent and chase measurable value, say industry leaders

Artificial intelligence (AI) is forcing companies to rethink how they hire, organise work and measure business value, with the next decade likely to be defined less by who has the most powerful models and more by who can redesign their organisations around the technology, business leaders said on Friday.

The shift is happening, with companies moving from asking what AI can do to deciding where it can deliver measurable results. But the transition is putting equal pressure on talent, leadership and organisational change, they said at a panel themed 'Leadership in the Age of AI: Reinventing Business for the Next Decade'.

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"About 18 months back, it used to be, 'what can I do with AI? Have I really started my journey on AI?'" said Irina Ghose, managing director, Anthropic India.

"People have now gone past any demos and want to use it and be convinced about it," she said, adding that companies are now looking at production-scale deployment, testing and audit trails.

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As artificial intelligence gets embedded deeper into business processes, the way companies themselves are organised could also change, said Verena Siow, president, Asia Pacific, SAP.

She said this could eventually lead to what SAP calls the "autonomous enterprise", but emphasised that autonomy should not be confused with removing people from businesses.

"It's not that there are no more people left in the company," Siow said. Instead, technology should handle activities and tasks that can be automated, allowing employees to focus on strategy, business growth and higher-value work.

Enterprise AI will need to be embedded into business processes, with trusted data and governance around it, she said. "We can run autonomously so that our people can focus on strategy and are still very much on top of giving direction," Siow noted.

For investors, however, India's opportunity may lie less in building frontier artificial intelligence models and infrastructure and more in applying the technology to businesses.

That acceleration is also changing the talent dynamic. Companies can no longer assume that the skills they hire for today will remain relevant over the next few years, said Cheryl Lim, partner at global consulting firm McKinsey.

"We hire for mindset, for attitude, for the cultural fit rather than necessarily the skills. There is a desire to say we can build and train people over time," Lim said.

"These are traits that I think are particularly relevant in today's AI age because we don't necessarily know what skills we need in the future," she said.

The challenge, however, is not simply hiring differently. Companies will need to redesign jobs and build systems for continuous reskilling as AI becomes embedded in everyday work.

"The companies that are going to win are the companies that are amazing talent factories," Lim said. She argued that the organisations would need to become better at "upskilling, reskilling, redeployment at scale".

The ability to capture value from artificial intelligence remains a problem. While 80-90% of companies say they are investing in AI, Lim said a similar proportion were not yet seeing value capture.

"The bigger part is how do we help our talent prepare for it and what's the change management in play?" she said.

"India has a much better chance to use AI because it's scalable. And India has enormous talent," said Hans Christian Dall Nygard, head of private equity, SPEC Finance.

"As an investor, we're much more bent on investing into companies that are utilising this technology than actually developing the infrastructure of the technology itself," Nygard said.

Dall Nygard said India has infrastructure to use artificial intelligence to tackle "complex and real-world problems," rather than attempt to replicate the capital-intensive AI infrastructure race dominated by the US and China.

The debate is also moving from whether artificial intelligence will replace jobs to how it will change the nature of work. Consulting, for instance, is already seeing a sharp productivity impact, Lim said.

"Consulting is absolutely being impacted already today. I see my starting analyst building in minutes, at most hours, things that used to take us weeks to put together," she said.

But that does not eliminate the need for human judgement, relationships and organisational understanding, she said.

"The question is not about, 'does AI replace us', but 'how does AI augment the thinking?'" Lim said.