ZOHO CEO Sridhar Vembu Said, AI Will Replace Roles, Not Employees

Zoho's co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said on 21st July 2023 that AI will only replace roles, not employees.

ZOHO CEO Sridhar Vembu Said, AI Will Replace Roles, Not Employees

Amid debates about artificial intelligence (AI) replacing jobs, Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) major Zoho's co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said on 21 July 2023 that AI will only replace roles, not employees.

"Language models are generating human-sounding, plausible text but it can be a fiction and it is a problem... At Zoho, we believe that AI can only replace roles but people will still matter. It reflects an organisation's philosophy," Vembu said during his keynote address to Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from various industries at an event organised by ManageEngine and Zoho in Chennai.

This comes at a time when organisations are increasingly looking to utilise AI to automate many services.

In fact, Dukaan co-founder Suumit Shah tweeted that the e-commerce SaaS firm has laid off more than 90 percent of its customer support employees.

Also Read : Bengaluru-based Dukaan has fired 90% of its support team, Replaces AI Chatbots

"We had to lay off 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely, " he tweeted.

Zoho's Vembu also added that the AI hype period is settling, and now the tech is evolving to be more useful for organisations.

"The current wave of peak has been reached. We are now in the long, tough slog to make the tech useful for enterprises," he said.

Vembu also spoke about a survey conducted within Zoho's ecosystem, involving around 8,000 people.

"We noticed that about 52 percent use it (ChatGPT) on a regular basis, 30 percent used it, but usage is dropping, and 15 percent have entirely stopped using it. I find myself in the 30 percent category. The initial usage frenzy is dropping, and more meaningful use cases are emerging," he said.

Vembu's comments come at a time when Zoho announced that it is investing in and exploring the generative AI space in its operations.

The SaaS giant recently launched around 13 generative AI Zoho application extensions and integrations, powered by ChatGPT.

Zoho is also blending third-party intelligence with Zia, its AI engine, which runs on Zoho's secure cloud.

In June 2023, Zoho announced that it is building its own large language model (LLM), similar to OpenAI's GPT and Google's PaLM 2 models. The project is being overseen by Vembu and is being worked on by the company's R&D team in India.

LLMs are a type of AI model specifically designed to understand natural language. They can process and generate text, allowing them to be used for a variety of tasks such as language translation, summarisation, and question-answering.

Vembu has also been advocating for the implementation of an AI policy in India. In May 2023, Vembu, along with Rajiv Kumar, former vice chairman of Niti Aayog, and Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation, submitted a proposal to the central government.

The primary objective of this proposal is to establish an AI policy that prioritizes openness and transparency.

Macroeconomic pressure

Zoho also witnessed the impacts of macroeconomic pressures, which led to a slowdown in SaaS businesses. The company slowed down hiring in FY22.

SaaS rival Freshworks conducted several rounds of layoffs to weather the macroeconomic pressure.

However, Vembu said that Zoho will not lay off employees, no matter what.

"We definitely saw downturn... I told my employees that there may be salary cuts, no hikes but definitely no layoffs...This reflects the philosophy of the company," he said..

-- Moneycontrol

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