Wipro has confirmed that by the end of this financial year, tasks done by over 10,000 engineers could become automated, reports LiveMint. It adds that Wipro launched its artificial intelligence (AI) platform Holmes 18 months ago, and is in the process of utilizing manpower more efficiently by allowing more of its managers to identify work which will not require engineers in each of the over 20,000 projects currently underway. The software giant has already ‘freed’ 4,300 employees and reassigned existing employees to new work, reports Huffington Post.The role of automation is  now transcending mundane maintenance tasks and leading into more specialised work like software development and Wipro is taking the lead in this revolution which seeks to make an aggressive push in ‘hyper-automation’,reports the Huffington Post. The LiveMint report adds that the move could mean a massive overhaul in the existing structure of utilizing multiple engineers for maintenance. And this would naturally mean considerable cutting of costs and improving efficiency overall. The company is currently undergoing the  process of appointing individual leaders in each of the six industry-serving segments and five solution offering verticals who will be responsible for  automating mundane maintenance work., says the LiveMint report. The Huffington Post further reports that according to a research report by HfS Research, an analyst firm, automation, artificial intelligence, or other forms of “digital labour” that can perform low to high skill jobs could eliminate up to 1.4 million jobs, or nine per cent of the global IT services and BPO workforce by 2021. And that IT would be one of the industries that would be hardest hit by this phenomenon. In India alone, IT employs 3.5 million people so this could have a massive impact and drive unemployment rates even further than where they currently stand, adds the HuffPost.Ultimately, it appears that all the sci-fi afficionados that predicted that robots and artificial intelligence would soon begin taking over the world were not too far from the truth. But this advancement will hopefully pave the way into using human resources in more specialised knowledge related practices instead of mundane tasks like maintenance and data entry.

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