AI transition irreversible, regulation and cost to determine pace and depth: TeamLease EdTech CEO

The ongoing transition to an AI-driven world is irreversible, but regulation and cost of usage will ultimately determine just how rapidly and deeply it permeates businesses and everyday life, TeamLease EdTech Founder and CEO Shantanu Rooj has said.

As infusion of AI becomes mainstream, merely possessing AI skills will cease to be a differentiator, and domain expertise, understanding of markets and consumers, and the ability to deploy the frontier technology to generate business advantages will gain an edge, he said.

"...people with domain skills, analytical skills and transformation professionals who can look at workflows, industries, inefficiencies, use AI to improve revenues, reduce cost or improve engagement will possibly gain a lot of favour," Rooj told PTI.

He likened AI-led disruption to "climate change" and said it should not be construed as "a passing shower".

"Whatever is happening all around us because of AI, to my mind, is not a passing shower, it's (akin to) climate change. The world is not going to come back ever to a pre-AI era once this transition happens...cost considerations and regulations are the two important factors which will decide the future speed and depth to which AI is going to take shape in our day-to-day lives," he said.

AI agents becoming more active and interacting, competing with one another, are likely to bring a new set of challenges, not seen in the past, he noted.

The adoption of AI is creating new roles in areas such as cybersecurity, cloud and infrastructure management, he said adding humans will remain accountable for the actions of AI agents in foreseeable future.

Rooj said regulatory intervention would determine what AI should or should not be allowed to do, the functions and industries where it can be deployed, and where limits need to be placed on its capabilities.

"There will be intervention of regulations to say what should AI do, what shouldn't AI do, what limit should we allow AI to work with, in which industry, what type of functions and where we have to limit their capabilities...there has been a lot of discussion but I'm sure governments are also thinking around it. We expect regulations to come into AI," he said adding some form of "barricading" or guardrails can be expected going forward.

The comments assume significance given the intensifying debate over the regulatory guardrails needed to govern AI, including what the frontier technologies should be allowed to do, and where limits should be placed on its use.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for slowing the pace at which frontier AI capabilities advance to give safety measures time to catch up, proposing independent evaluators, coordination among leading AI companies and international cooperation.

Sam Altman, in remarks made over the weekend, has reportedly said OpenAI will not go public in 2026, drawing attention to safety concerns over AI that make scenarios of 10 per cent risk of AI causing extinction "unacceptable".

Cases of AI agents going rogue and hacking external systems, disobeying human mandates, have triggered an alarm globally as have AI safety researchers quitting their jobs, penning extensive and candid social media posts outlining their deep concerns on technology risks.

Cost will be the other key consideration to be kept in mind, Rooj said.

While the initial euphoria around AI was driven in part by easy access to the technology, businesses are increasingly having to factor in the actual cost of deploying it in an enterprise environment, he said.

As companies scale up adoption, there could be situations where deploying humans turns out to be more cost-effective than using AI, he observed.

Asked about his views on the technology's impact on employment, Rooj argued that AI will transform jobs rather than simply take them away, but acknowledged that certain entry-level roles are likely to disappear faster than higher-level ones.

Jobs that are repetitive, follow a pattern or involve predictable inputs and outputs are particularly susceptible to automation, he said.

"So I think overall jobs are not vanishing but types of jobs are definitely changing. The jobs that exist today may not be the jobs that will exist tomorrow. But new jobs, roles will become important," he said.

People with AI fluency, an enterprising mindset and domain and industry skills will increasingly find favour with employers, he said.

Rooj said the disruption should not be a reason to panic, but is a clear call for workers to transform and re-imagine their skills as shelf life of what was considered conventional skillset, continues to shrink.

Rooj said it is tough to predict which skills will remain relevant five years from now, making continuous learning and reskilling increasingly important.

"It's very difficult to say what skills will be definitely relevant five years from now and the only thing that you can make sure is that you're worthy of the future. And hence continuous, lifelong learning is now becoming de facto," Rooj said.

Businesses themselves are uncertain about how AI, automation and robotisation will eventually reshape their models, and are consequently looking for people who are digital-natives, AI-fluent, adaptable and multi-skilled, he said.

Such multi-skilled employees are likely to be favoured over those with a single skill as they can be deployed across different roles while businesses transition and new requirements emerge, Rooj said.

He also cautioned universities against rushing to create specialised AI courses without adequately assessing the skills that the future workforce will actually need.

"...there is 'herd mentality' and I've seen almost every university or college in this country launching a course in AI," he said.

Rooj said the world will not need only AI specialists, but "AI-enabled domain specialists" who can apply the technology to improve functions such as purchasing, warehousing and logistics, marketing and employee engagement.

The transformation will also require universities to move away from a "monolithic" degree structure towards education that is more modular and multimodal, Rooj said, envisioning a combination of online, on-site and on-the-job learning alongside stackable credits.

Employer expectations from fresh graduates are changing as well, with work experience increasingly becoming an important part of the hiring equation.

"In my grandfather's time only education got you a job. There was a time when education plus skills kept your job, but times are changing. And now it's education plus skills plus experience which will get you job," Rooj said.

Universities should, therefore, embed real-life learning into degree programmes through live projects, internships, apprenticeships and on-the-job learning, he said, noting that employers are increasingly unwilling to spend months training fresh graduates from scratch.

The worlds of academia and work can no longer operate in silos, Rooj said adding it is important for universities and colleges to ensure that they bring the concept of academic learning, workplace requirements, and real-time learning to build future-ready programmes.