India’s IT workforce has been worried about automation technologies taking away their jobs. And many have indeed lost their jobs to bots, the new robot economy is expected to create even larger number of jobs that will also be high paying.

“The demand for RPA (robotic process automation) based solutions in India has significantly increased over the last few years. We expect this demand to reach even greater heights in the coming years and as a result, RPA as a category can create new job opportunities in the range of 2,90,000-3,20,000 over the next three years,” Ankur Kothari, Chief Revenue Office and Co-Founder of Automation Anywhere, told BusinessLine .

Automation Anywhere is the biggest player in the Robotic Process Automation space. RPA allows companies to replicate any repeatable job process with a bot.

Automation Anywhere has already deployed over 6 lakh bots across the world that can replicate the work done by one more person. Yet, these bot don’t always take away jobs and instead aid in achieving tasks that humans generally can’t. Even industry body Nasscom sees RPA as a positive trend for the industry and something that’ll help improve the pay scales of IT employees.

“The definition of an IT company is changing rapidly and we are seeing banks to government to hospitals looking for developers and algorithm builders, etc. These will be highly paid jobs but not necessarily at IT services companies,” said Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh.

Nasscom has identified 40 new job roles, including several that’ll be created due to the impact of the bot economy. Once there is a mix of human and bot workforce, several new job roles will start to emerge. For example, you’ll need developers to build these bots, process analysts who can re-engineers processes for bots, or man-machine interface. There’ll also be role for human resource managers for bots.

Nasscom is already in the process of creating descriptions for some of these jobs and for reskilling the existing workforce.

“The demand for RPA solutions in India has increased exponentially over the last few years due to significant adoption by GICs, financial institutions, telecom service providers, technology and manufacturing companies. Automation Anywhere expects its extraordinary growth momentum to continue as it invests in a technology ecosystem which has a rich talent pool, robust training programs and a strong partner network,” Kothari said.

Automation Anywhere also runs its own online training programme for various bot-related work and offers it for along with a certificate.

Kothari said that India is emerging as the automation hub for the world similar to the explosive evolution of IT which took place over the last few decades.

“The country has witnessed enormous economic progress in the last decade, transforming Indian enterprises to world-class levels. MNCs worldwide view India as an automation centre where the available talent is second to none. As RPA’s rapid adoption continues at organisations, we see India driving this trend worldwide. India is already the largest development centre for us and we expect this to only accelerate through 2020.”

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