Mr. Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya (Country Group Head – HR, at Mahindra Finance) presented and shared his insights on the topic “Emerging Trends in Technology in HR”, at the HR Conclave organized at IIM Indore. He spoke about the challenges faced by industries such as rapid urbanization, aging of the workforce, shifts in the global economic power which encompasses trade wars amongst nations, a paucity of resources and climate change. He further spoke about automation taking over most industries and the advent of robots in the workforce alongside humans in the near future. After the talk, we got a chance to have a small interview with him-
Anugya– India is majorly an agrarian economy with a major percentage of population involved in primary sector. Do you think that automation is the need of the hour for the primary sector?
Jyotirmoy– Yes, definitely. Automation is something that is actually happening. It is something that has hit us, not something that we were expecting to come. Automation has applications, even at the farm level. When we talk of automation, we don’t limit ourselves just to the product, but to the farmer’s lifecycle in order to gauge questions like when the farmer would be visiting, how much loan he would need, what kind of product he would demand etc. In India, there is a scarcity of infrastructure from automation point of view, so the pace of automation will differ, but it will surely hit us.
Anugya– How will the advent of technologies like AI and machine learning, affect the penetration of robots into HR, a field that involves quite a lot of human interaction and interpersonal relations?
Jyotirmoy– Robots will be complementary to the human beings, definitely. A robot is an entity that is going to facilitate the functioning, and hence, will be supplementary to humans. Talking of autonomous intelligence, it’s currently a journey of increasing the decision-making capacity of robots but shortly, the robots will also be accounted for in the manpower needed i.e. calculating requirement in the number of robots, along with employees.
Anugya– A majority of clients of Mahindra Finance are people involved in primary sector with many having their own apprehensions about technology. How do you make them understand the technology?
Jyotirmoy– Technology is something that they experience, they need not understand it. For example, if a farmer is getting his aftersale services delivered to him right when he needs it without needing to approach an office but at his doorstep, if he is getting all information delivered to him about the loan such as where to pay, what to pay etc. right on his mobile phone, he’d be satisfied. Also, the farmers these days are very well informed. They are experts in their trade. We just provide a financial product that helps them in materializing their vision.
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