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upGrad Enterprise aims to build the world’s largest GenAI learning initiative to enable high-growth companies to embrace technology’s transformative business impact. Hosted by Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterprise, the GenAIrous Podcast, will curate an exciting roster of global experts and guests, who are at the cutting-edge of Generative AI, and its varied applications in the world of business.
Welcome to the GenAIrous Podcast where we unravel the fascinating world of generative AI and its transformative impact on business globally. I'm your host, Srikanth Iyengar, CEO of upGrad Enterprise. At upGrad Enterprise, we're building the world's largest Gen AI learning initiative, empowering high growth companies to leverage cutting edge technology. Each week, join me and the roster of global experts as we explore innovations shaping the world of work as we know it. Let's get GenAIrous.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Welcome to another episode of the generous podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Amit Choudhary. Amit has had a very, very, you know, illustrious career across consulting, global tech services at leadership roles. Amit, thank you so much for joining us from the East Coast.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Hey, Srikanth. Thank you for having me here. I'm very excited for this conversation.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Super. Super. Amit and, you know, let's get started. As you know, we talk about various perspectives on generative AI through this podcast and I know that you've got a very interesting and in some ways a very contrarian perspective. You know, guests I've had on this podcast have talked about the fact that humans are catching up with AI. And when you and I spoke, you talked about it potentially being a different view. So why don't we hear from you and your perspective?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Yeah. I strongly believe that AI is catching up with the humans. If you go back in history, the AI concept is not new. It started in 1950s. So in fact, much before anyone of us were born. And, and now is when it is starting to make, sense to people. So, in fact, if I look at it, in the last 2 decades, we have digitized everything. We have gone through digital evolution. We have digitized not only data, but images, processes, and everything. And now we have all this data sitting with us structured, unstructured, and we have to figure out what to do with that.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:And and, therefore, the tools of AI is something catching up to help us, do something with last 2 decades of digitizing information. If you look at the human abilities, a very popular, analysis, which is called as a Flynn Effect, tells us that, the cognitive abilities of humans have continuously improved. In fact, the IQ, if you look at it over the last, 50, 100 years, has continuously increased. So, clearly, our ability for cognitive and creative conversations and analysis has improved while AI was being worked on. And, thirdly, if you just look at our kids, what they are studying at school, they do higher higher algebra in middle school, higher calculus in high school, and whatnot in the colleges. And then they come back to the job, and they start with Excel all over again. So clearly, our jobs have not kept pace with, our cognitive abilities. AI in many ways has not kept pace with our cognitive abilities. So in my view, AI is actually playing catch up to what human abilities and capabilities are, not only in the IQ world, but the all the queues, including EQ and IQ.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:I think that was fascinating perspective. So, you know, I can sort of relate to that. Humans make progress every generation, and I think what we've seen in the past also is that technology only serves to make human productivity go up. You know, there was talk when computers came in or even typewriters came in that a large number of people would get redundant. But you know what? Given our cognitive ability, humans upskilled ourselves. We're doing more complex jobs. We're adding more value to our lives, making lives across the world better. So is it fair to say that AI would be a similar, let's say, accelerator or booster for human ability?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Absolutely. In fact, I'm a strong believer that AI is another tool, in the in the in the set that humans have developed over a period of years. Not even as important as fire and wheel. And we have always evolved to learn how to leverage these tools for for our benefit and for our society's benefits. So, clearly, for for me, it is an accelerator. Like, a calculator was an accelerator many years ago. Computer was an accelerator many years ago. And the more we leverage it for our benefit, the more we can move faster. And, therefore, one of the things that I have read and is fascinating is, it is not AI that will replace the humans. It is the humans leveraging AI that will replace the humans not leveraging AI.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Absolutely. So no one needs to be left behind. And that brings me to the other point you raised, Amit, where you said, you know, we learned complex algebra, geometry, sciences at school and college. Some of us like you better than others. But as we get to the workplace, you know, we end up using Excel and Word, largely, you know, which are far more, far simpler to use and to a certain extent, if I dare say dumb down, if you call it that. But now, clearly, we have instances in the work place of employees in various companies, and you've worked with many clients across the globe. You worked in global corporations and tech services where employees are using ChatGPT as they do their jobs. They're using some other, you know, copilot or prompt. So how do you see that impact of AI at the workplace? How do you see different industries starting to or not adopting AI? Any perspectives there?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:AI is already having a lot of impact on the industries. In fact, what happened in, in the end of 2022 was what is called the iPhone moment of, of AI, where AI, even though it was there always there for for decades, it became much more accessible to people. And and, obviously, at the same time, the compute power was increasing significantly. So AI, in that sense, has made the transition, the switch from being available only to very niche set of people to being available to all. And that is the true power of AI, where where it is being used as a tool as opposed to an end goal in itself.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:And that's where in the corporates, what you will understand and see is the first job or or the first objective of most of the corporates is to just educate the people about the capabilities of AI to to make it come out of the black box, to make it visible and transparent to people that this is something good that you should leverage as opposed to something that you have to be scared of. And, therefore, the awareness level of AI education is one of the most foundational and fundamental things that most of the corporates are spending time time on. And and then, obviously, they are building the capabilities in terms of now that people understand how to use AI in their day-to-day jobs. How can we leverage some true engineering mindset in engineers to solve the problems that does not necessarily have to be solved by 95% of the people who are going to be mostly users of AI. So, clearly, that is where the differentiation is starting to come up is, in fact, in the last 2 decades, if you will, we had blurred the differentiation between an engineer and a coder to a large extent.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Every coder was an engineer and every engineer was supposed to be a coder. And what is exciting for me in the new phase is that boundary will start unblurring again, where while AI and GenAI can simplify and and help us code faster and and as they say, English is the new coding language, the engineering mindset about problem solving, about creating thing creative thinking is still going to be a true differentiator, and that's where I'm very excited that that the engineers will come back involved. But these will be engineers of a different type, and that is where the corporates are starting to understand what type of skills do they need for the future and what type of, inbuilt homegrown, technology and training that they need to provide so that they can upscale their people.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:I think that's a great point and, in fact, very relevant to our listeners. As you know, we train a couple of 1000000 people a year. Many of them, upskill themselves in technology. Many of them are engineers. And irrespective of their choice of study in engineering, often they end up being software engineers. They end up being programmers. And I think what you're saying is that coding skill, the ability to generate code is gonna be done by AI. So that brings core engineering skills back to the limelight, to the forefront. And I think that's gonna change the way people who join colleges today, especially in developing countries like India that you and I both had a lot of exposure to. It's gonna change people's aspirations because, you know, if you went back 20 years, people wanted to do a good sciences or engineering degree with the objective of getting a coding job. So what happens to those jobs in the future, in your view?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Those jobs, like many other jobs, where the tools have helped us do them more, more effectively and more efficiently, will evolve. In fact, I would say, the coding jobs will evolve to to get more and more engineering aspect of the coding than the coding itself. But at the same time, there will be a couple of skills and couple of dimensions that will become more and more important, and those will be the domain understanding. It is not only one software that will solve all the problems, one one ring to control them all. It will be that one software that has to be applied in the context of an industry that, that is going through a problem solution.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:So how will you apply AI in the context of financial services and not even a financial services? For example, in wealth management versus payments might be different than how do you apply and leverage AI in health care or in pharmaceutical industry. And that is the power of, of domain understanding that is starting to become more and more relevant and important for, for the skills of the future.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:And then on top of it, the adaptability of our people, and including us, is going to be very important, because we will not know what to learn 5 years from now or 3 years from now. As they say, the half life of any skill that you hire a person into a company for has become 3 to 5 years. So as long as the individual is adaptable and then you have the tools being made available from the corporates to these, individuals to keep themselves up to speed in terms of new technology, new learning, new ways of doing things, that adaptability will become very important, for the skills of tomorrow.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:I think, of a key key shout out for our listeners, that 3 to 5 year time frame you talked about in terms of completely reinventing oneself is something that people have to adopt or embrace very strongly. Yeah. Yeah.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Absolutely. In fact, I cannot stop myself but, give a cricket, story around this. Whereas the cricket world, in our lifespan has evolved from test cricket to one day cricket to T20, our own lives will go in the reverse direction where we need to start thinking about building an innings. We need to start thinking about second inning. So for for us, from a skill point of view, from a competency point of view, humans need to move from T20 to 1 day cricket to test cricket, where you're really setting up, your career, to span over decades as opposed with skills changing every 3 to 5 years.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Makes makes a lot of sense. I love the cricket analogy. Coming back, you alluded to domain knowledge and industries, Amit. So I just wanna drill back drill down back on that. So we talked about, you know, even within financial services, the use of AI and wealth management or let's say in corporate banking could be very different from retail. You talked about pharma and life sciences where things could be different. Clearly, the implications of the use cases are different by industry. They're different actually even within the value chain in each of those industries. There are other, implications to be considered like privacy laws. So any any thoughts? Have you seen any industries or any particular use cases emerged faster than others?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Yes. In fact, the interesting thing is, as soon as this whole AI, wave started, everybody was talking about use cases, and and everybody started talking about 100 and thousands of use cases. And, therefore, most of the clients started getting interested and started talking about, tell me about case studies more than use cases. Because use cases in many ways are theoretical in nature, whereas case studies is, have you done something for yourself? Have you used this for yourself? And, therefore, tell me a real story as opposed to a theoretical story. And that is where, I would say, the areas where things are repetitive, things that might not necessarily be core, have were the first to pick up pace in terms of the case studies that were getting implemented.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:These were areas across the industry, but but even if you look at the horizontals, customer servicing, in terms of chatbots, in terms of even personalized services, were one of the first areas that took off. It you talk about associate, platforms where people have HR questions, HR queries. These were voluminous in in the past and and but there are many 80, 90% of the questions are the same that people have, and then joining new to the organization.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Those are the areas that have picked up very fast in the risk management space, or audit space. Many times, people used to only do sample based auditing. And now with the capability of AI, you can actually do a 100% auditing, of all the scenarios and all the all the cases. So, clearly, the the areas that are voluminous as well as simple to automate have been the areas that have been picked up first. And that is also a way for the companies to start getting comfortable with the idea of leveraging here.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:But many of the companies have moved beyond that. And and once again, coming back, it is not only these things that have happened in the last 2 years. It has been happening for for much longer than that, but things like drug discovery, things like, supply chain management, And supply chain management in both the services industry as well as in the in the real goods industry, have started leveraging AI to, to a large extent in terms of how do you, predict the inventory levels and therefore how do you reorder? How do you in the services industry, how do you match their evolving skills to the job requirements? And, therefore, how can you leverage, the best person at the best place for the best problem to be solved.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:And and that is what if you look at it across different service areas, in the sales side. There is a I mean, the the whole industry, has struggled with cold calling. And in the last few, quarters, I have seen how the cold calling or the sales reach out, industry has evolved from a pure cold email to a much warmer cold email, if you will, where the the customization of the messages being sent, the conversations being had, is much more relevant to the receiver of the message than, a blast of emails that they are being sent across. So, clearly, case studies across the verticals and the horizontals that are very relevant, and and going back to the domain understanding, the industry understanding of the problem to be solved.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:AI, once again, is not the end in itself. The problems that the clients are facing are the true ends, and the problems that our clients' customers are facing are the true ends. And AI is a tool to solve those problems.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:No. I think some very, very good use cases there. But, that that actually brings me to another sort of an interesting juncture, Amit. So, you know, a lot of the clients that you and I have worked with through our careers often have build or buy decisions to make. You know, do they build this capability internally? Do they work with world class partners? You've been at the helm of 1, you know, for a while and another one before that. From a neutral point of view, what would your advice to senior execs and corporations be? Is it one or the other? Is there a balanced strategy? What would you think a good way to be for them to go forward as they explore AI?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Once again, I love the idea of yin yang. There is never one black and white answer, and and there will never be either build or buy as the only solution available. In fact, wherever this conversation comes up, I always encourage to take a step back and start thinking about, firstly, what your own business strategy is, what your own core competency and strategic intent is. Firstly, that is an important thing to start the any AI conversation or any strategic conversation. Then we have to also look at, the solution of is it time to market? Do do I have enough time to develop a solution internally, or do I need to go to market very fast? And more often than not, it has to be it it ends up being more, go to market fast in terms of resource availability. Do I have enough capabilities internally? And it is not only about human capabilities, it is about infrastructure capabilities, to do it in house, or do we need, need someone from outside? And and then you also have to look at, is this specific field of AI a mature relative nothing is mature in in a generic sense.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:But it is that specific problem being solved by AI, a mature field or still an evolving field. And, therefore, when you look at all these things, is this core and, therefore, I want to do it myself, or is this less or noncore and, therefore, I can outsource it? Do I have enough time to market, or do I need to move fast, and therefore do I need some external help? Do I have enough capabilities and and resources inside, or do I need to borrow that for some time while I build that capability? And is this a mature solution where I can just go and buy something, or is this something that has to be customized and it will keep on evolving? All of those different dimensions go and feed into the build or buy decision.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:I firmly believe that, therefore, at an organization level, it will always be a mix of build and buy. But at a particular solution level, you might be able to take a decision, and this one of the CIOs, very aptly put it, across saying there's a platform and there are use cases. And you can have one of the 3 possible models. You can either have an Uber Eats model, which says you buy the platform and you buy the use cases along with the platform, or you can have a grocery chain model where you buy the platform, but you build your own use cases. So you're buying the ingredients but building your own meal, or you can have farm to table.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:You you raise the crops that you want to eat, and you actually build and and make the food that you want to eat. And that can be you build the platform as well as you build the use cases. And, therefore, if you look at these various scenarios, ultimately, it will be the specific problem to be solved that will determine a build or buy decision. And that is where it becomes very important to have people with the right set of expertise and experience to go to to always brainstorm because this is not something that I would encourage you to do by yourself alone in a corner.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:No. Great. Great point. I love the analogy about Uber Eats versus grocery retail versus farm to table, I mean, makes makes a lot of sense. I think it also comes down to the ability of the organization exactly like you said because to be able to do farm to table, you need the skills, you need the mindset, you need that ability to prioritize, and you need the how do I put it? The internal conviction from senior management to push it through because these are not gonna be quick fixes. There's you know, one needs a staying part as well. So, you know, I get this question from a lot of execs. How do they upskill themselves on the senior execs? Because we all have varying, degrees of knowledge. We all have different ways in which we upskill ourselves.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:So, a very good question. And going back to, the point about the half life of any skill is 3 to 5 years, upskilling and continuous learning is at the core of of the leaders of tomorrow. And and and everybody learns in their own ways. So there is no one standard way of learning. In fact, what might work for me might not work for others, but I can at least share.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:In fact, one of the things that has helped me a lot in the last few years, and not only on AI but any of the new skills coming up, is reverse mentoring. There is so much that you can learn, from people entering the industry new with a new perspective. So surround yourself with people who are curious. I have learned so much from my kids and their friends, because once again, the perspective that they bring to the table is completely different. For us, we have to learn AI.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:For them, they might not even know what AI is different than what everything else that they have been exposed to. So, like, that that generation is a smartphone native. That generation is going to become AI native, and everything is inbuilt into what they come up with. So reading a lot, talking to a lot of people coming from various backgrounds, is is hugely beneficial for me. And then, going back and and doing all certifications, the the good thing today is there is no dearth of of material available for people to learn.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:It is the desire to learn. It is a desire to take out those 1, 2, 3, 4 hours every week to say, this is my investment in building my career as opposed to just, managing the day to day, which is the most fruitful for me. And I would say, to top it all, listening more than talking helps a lot because, because when you listen when you listen to the different points of view, you never know what are the new things that you're learning on a daily basis.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Amit, thank you. Very, very sage advice for our listeners, many of whom I know are keen to leapfrog their careers. And I think as they say, an overnight success takes 20 years to build. So I guess this is a bit like that. So, you know, let me let me just, start with you know, you talked about young people. You talked about, you know, your kids, my kids. But what would your advice be to someone who's at the start of their career? You've told them how they should learn. But there are questions today from these people about, you know, do I focus on technology, which was the biggest industry in the future? Or, you know, for example, today you talk about LLMs where language becomes super important.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Prompting is in language. So skills are changing and, you know, a lot of us are making decisions about careers, looking forward, and things will change the next 20, 30 years. So as a senior CXO level professional, as a parent, any advice to those 20 something you're also listening in today?
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:I'll tell you, I love maths and physics. And one of the examples that comes to my mind over here is while solving the maths problems early in our lives, and especially calculus, you look for the global maxima of a function. And and what I say these days is when you're solving a maths problem, you're given an equation, you're given the constraints, you know everything, and you're therefore being able to solve for the global maxima. In the real world, you don't know all the variables. You don't know all the constraints. And, therefore, over a period of time, what I have realized is as long as you have the North Star, aligned for where you want to head in general, Move from one local maxima to the next local maxima. Don't try to solve world hunger.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:And then the second thing that is important to understand is, the good news is that people are living for longer, And I said the bad news is the skills are becoming irrelevant sooner, and therefore, the gap between the 2, will not be covered by itself. And therefore, if you can learn to learn, another cliche, it will be it will be the best skill set for you to adopt. And therefore and also, keep in mind, there is rarely a a life changing wrong decision that you can make.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:I have seen people with a star career in their teenage, slow down because, they had different priorities later on. And I have seen people who, who were confused in the in the early years and then got focused and then more than caught up with, with the rest of the world. So the good news is there is enough time. And if you make a mistake, 1 year or 2 years, you feel you have lost it. As long as you learn from those mistakes, there is enough time in front of you, to be able to catch up and get ahead if that is what your end goal is.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:But never make the mistake of not learning new things, not exposing you to new things, because that clearly is something that will add to your portfolio of capabilities over a period of time. And you will look back 20 years from now and realize, oh, wow. These experiences are really what my asset is built of, not the ability of solving a maths problem or a physics problem, which is a real asset.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Absolutely. You know, it reminds me of, something we talked about the iPhone moment earlier in our chat. And for those of you who've read, Steve Jobs' biography about Walter Isaacson, it it mentions that Steve Jobs actually spent, I think, 6 months or a year plucking apples in an orchard in Oregon, you know, after he dropped out of college or after he finished college. If you were to tell that to a young learner today, they'd think more a waste of time. But he does say that that was probably one of the most impactful stints in his life because he just plucked apples off trees. And, you know, he said it brought a level of focus that most of us don't ever learn. So lots of lessons there. I mean, given a choice, I would never do it. But, hey, if Steve Jobs does it, clearly it's worked for him. You never know.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:But, Amit, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. Much appreciated and, looking forward to more such conversations. But, clearly, we're at the cusp of what is a very, very exciting inflection point in the, you know, the global economy and the world at large. So looking forward to exploring this together.
Amit Choudhary, tech industry expert:Absolutely, Srikanth. This the next 4 5 to 10 years are literally once in a lifetime opportunity for many people in the industry. And people 15, 20 years from now will look back and say, I was a part of this journey, that many people might just love and cherish. And so be a part of this journey because this is not going to repeat itself. There will be other journeys. There will be other opportunities, but it is this opportunity is here and now.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:Here and now. Let's end on that note, thank you so much.
Srikanth Iyengar, CEO upGrad Enterprise:And that concludes another episode of the GenAIrous Phodcast. We are very grateful to our guests for their time and expertise. A big thank you to our producer, Shanta Shankar in Delhi, and our audio engineer, Nitin Shams in Berlin, for making magic happen behind the scenes. Join us next time, and don't forget to subscribe to GenAIrous wherever you listen to your podcasts.