AI revolution will revive traditional jobs: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu

Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corporation shared an optimistic view on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market in another series of posts on social media platform X on Wednesday. 

In contrast to the widespread fears of mass unemployment due to AI, Vembu believes the AI revolution will lead to a revival of traditional jobs, helping provide better wages to local communities.

“What are the implications of this AI revolution? What jobs would humans do? Oddly enough, I suspect part of the answer is to revive traditional jobs and those jobs will pay better in terms of the purchasing power of their wages; because as production gets automated, goods and services become more affordable,” Vembu said. 

While AI has been well-known for taking over routine and technical tasks, Vembu says there will be a growing demand for jobs that require a human touch—roles that technology cannot replicate—even if it could. 

“As an example, people taking care of soil and water and farms, get paid decent wages because people may want to pay a good premium for small-scale-farmed food that is nature-friendly. Similarly, various artists perform at local festivals. That is not a job anyone would want AI to do, even if it can do it. Great teachers are valuable - human teachers will use AI but children would still want the human,” he said. 

To support this trend, Vembu pointed to the booming popularity of live concerts. “There has been a huge boom in live concerts in recent years, even as an infinite selection of recorded music is available almost free. Humans want the live concert experience. My point is that as tech replaces many jobs, jobs that previously got displaced may reappear,” he said.

According to the Zoho boss, “The biggest investment bet made in tech today is in the area of "service-as-software" or to put it in plain language, AI replacing humans doing the work."

"Think of AI para-legal, AI call centre agents, AI accountants, AI video production specialists, AI software engineers, and so on,” Vembu said. 

Although in the early days, he expects to see a large impact on software development, where productivity can go up 10-fold. 

He further cautioned against over-reliance on technological solutions that could concentrate wealth and power. “Part of it is also a political economy question - how do the productivity gains from AI get distributed to farmers, musicians, and teachers? The wrong answer in my opinion is the Universal Basic Income. It would indicate the failure of the political economy to have to adopt UBI. We can do better,” Vembu said

“To be able to do better than UBI, it is critical to ensure that the technology know-how of AI is not concentrated in too few hands. Just say no to AI monopolies!” he added.