Davos, Jan 23 (PTI) Humans will continue to play a key role despite being outnumbered by AI agents, just like teachers are always more important in a classroom, global IT giant Cognizant's President Americas Surya Gummadi has said.
"AI is everywhere and in all industries, be it financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, consumer, communications, media and technology," Gummadi told PTI in an interview here during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.
Cognizant is a key player in helping corporates build AI solutions and help them pivot.
Gummadi, who has been with Cognizant for 26 years in different roles, said the AI agents can outnumber humans, but the human still has to be in the loop and human is very critical for everything that we do on AI.
"To manage the trust aspects, to manage the governance aspects and to train these agentic models, human is very important," he said.
There are agents at different levels, we have developer agents, we have senior agents and now there are hierarchies that are being built and now frameworks are being built to not just train these agents, but also do their performance evaluation.
"Senior agents will do the performance evaluation of junior agents and things like that. This whole concept is still evolving, but it is happening. Still human will always be in the loop," he said.
"Even though the agents might outnumber, there'll be a healthy mix of physical to digital workforce. The ratios might be different, but we are staring down at a future where there will be a mix of human and AI workforce," he said.
Asked if it could be like one teacher and 20-30 students in a classroom, Gummadi said one could look at it that way, but the ratio could vary, be it the same number of agents and humans, more humans or more agents in the workforce.
But, just like a teacher is very important in the classroom setup, human is extremely critical or the agentic era, he said.
At Cognizant, Gummadi said, there is a three-vector AI model.
"In vector one, which is leveraging AI, we help clients unlock the productivity of their current processes. The next step is industrializing AI, scaling AI across their tech stack.
"We help clients build AI solutions across their tech stack. We help clients with their data models build the native apps.
"And the third step is business process transformation, where clients build agents and multi-agent orchestration," he said.
On concerns of job losses due to AI, he said there is a period of transition during every technology shift and some jobs of the past would morph into new jobs and a slight dip might be there during the transition period.
"But, we are very focussed on how to increase the velocity and reduce the gap, how do we unlock the productivity and create more jobs than the jobs that are lost," he said.