With a large and young workforce, Southeast Asia is rapidly digitising. This paves the way for tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive economic growth and create new job opportunities.
According to a study by Cisco/Oxford Economics, over 10 per cent of the workforce in ASEAN could be displaced by new tech tools; lower-skilled workers in the service and agricultural sectors are the most vulnerable.
ChatGPT, a chatbot that interacts in a conversational way, has already made it into content marketing. While its full potential is yet to be realised, such tools could make some jobs redundant.
How soon can this happen, and should we really be worried?
“Tools like AI have the potential to displace jobs, but we find that more investments in technology and skills development are required to adapt to the changes,” says Ying Cong Seah, Head of Labs and Co-Founder of Glints, an online career discovery and development platform.
The market is already throwing some signals on the impact of ChatGPT revolution; On Upwork, a freelance platform, there are many listings from professional AI prompters offering their services. Seah, however, doesn’t believe that AI will steal our jobs.
“While AI will eliminate a set of job families, it will simultaneously create new jobs, increasing productivity and driving economic growth. So, not all is doom and gloom. If anything, a positive side effect of the recent hype around ChatGPT is that it has gotten many people to think about how the nature of their jobs would change. We are already seeing ChatGPT being used in many creative ways,” he notes.
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Sharing an example, Seah says content marketers use it to overcome writer’s block, bounce ideas to make engineering design decisions, and even structure performance appraisals. The upshot is that lower-value and more transactional conversational and creative work will likely be supplanted in the next few years. Higher-value work will rely on generative AI as an able partner.
Agreeing to his views, Abhinav Charan, Head of Partnerships & Business Development at Singapore-based talent platform skuad.io, says there seems to be a dystopian level of gloom and doom around layoffs and ChatGPT, with murmurs of AI-enabled systems replacing thousands of jobs worldwide.
“Since its release, ChatGPT has been used to write cover letters, poems, philosophical essays and white papers. The chatbot is powerful, no doubt. So, there is a fear that it will take over the more ‘creative’ job roles in an office setup — writers, marketers, developers, customer executives, etc.,” Charan says.
“However, it doesn’t seem likely that AI will be able to compete with humans in contextual understanding — at least, not anytime soon. AI isn’t a job destroyer. People need to be more accepting of digital and intelligent technologies and optimise them to perform better in their roles,” he argues.
While Southeast Asia sees many layoffs, white-collar jobs are the most affected. The blue-collar or the frontline workforce market is still booming in SEA. As companies start sensing economic uncertainties, the demand for managed workforce increases, which creates great demand for the workforce and services that we offer.
According to Siddharth Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of Betterplace-owned MyRobin, a platform for on-demand, pre-screened blue-collar workers, demand for the blue-collar workforce will remain despite the rise of AI solutions. “This is mainly because, at the current stage, AI is replacing jobs that are not customer intensive. However, the frontline workforce industry is a more customer-intensive workforce that directly connects with the end customers.”
AI doesn’t seem to impact these jobs at this stage significantly. If anything, it will optimise the operations of the frontline workforce and make the processes more cost-effective, he points out.
“This trend in the workforce in SEA is very similar to that of India, which is the largest market in South Asia. While white-collar workers across startups are going through tough layoffs, the frontline workforce market is expanding. In FY 22-23, 8 million new frontline jobs were created, and this number is expected to reach 9 million jobs by the end of this financial year,” Kumar states.
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“I don’t think AI can steal anything from us, leave alone our jobs,” says Dhaval Thanki, VP (APAC & MEA) at LogiNext, a tech firm providing SaaS-based delivery automation services. It will, in fact, transform (and is transforming as we speak) our lives, work, and experience.
“As long as we can adapt and evolve, we will be able to take advantage of AI to help our progress as individuals and professionals. The paranoia around AI taking away jobs stems from the general fear that technology will replace humans, but that’s not true; even historically (as far as we can look into the past), technology has only been an enabler of human progress,” states Thanki.
The nature of the jobs will change (and is changing), and while that transition is happening, people might see a little chaos, but it’s only for the better. In Thanki’s opinion, AI will ensure that humans can ‘outsource’ all the mundane, repetitive, standardisable jobs to AI. Therefore we can transition to doing more creative, inspirational things that are a better fit for our capabilities as humans.
For example, AI (robots) in assembly lines are already making assembly line workers’ jobs redundant in automotive and other industries in some sense. However, these workers are now graduating to better jobs like managing robotic process automation software that requires their cognitive skills to help execute their production targets more efficiently. This is because these software tools allow them to control assembly line manufacturing activity through AI and robots more efficiently.
“So, yes, AI will take away the ‘boring’ and ‘hazardous’ jobs and will require people to ‘upskill’ themselves so that we can take advantage of all the new jobs that AI will create for us. These ‘new’ jobs will be more worthy of our skills as humans in every field of activity,” Thanki reasons.
With the right investments in technology and skills development, Southeast Asia has the potential not only to survive but thrive in this new era of AI-driven innovation and economic growth. However, an Accenture study found that less than half of the companies in SEA have a clear strategy for reskilling and upskilling their employees.
“It is important for individuals, companies, and governments in SEA to understand the potential impact and take proactive steps to reskill and upskill their workforce. The future of work in a world with AI will require a combination of human skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and empathy, as well as a willingness to adapt and embrace change,” Glint’s Seah says.
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