This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on November 27, 2023 - December 3, 2023

In the escalating debate on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on employment, a looming sense of apprehension has given rise to fears of a global wave of “employment refugees”. However, Sanjay Sarma, CEO, president and dean of the Asia School of Business (ASB), offers a nuanced perspective.

In a world where algorithmic intelligence, specifically generative AI, is often painted as a harbinger of job losses and economic upheaval, Sanjay’s perspective reframes the narrative. AI, he says, has already been seamlessly integrated into our lives and work, making its presence inevitable. Yet, he contends that the real threat is not job replacement but rather the transformation of tasks.

Sanjay’s optimism lies in the belief that adapting to AI necessitates a strategic focus on education that aligns with its growth. He champions a proactive approach, emphasising that education should evolve alongside the rapid developments in the field. As a solution, he encourages individuals, particularly those in leadership roles, to embrace continuous learning.

“AI isn’t going to take jobs. What AI is going to do is take tasks. A job is a bundle of tasks, and what AI will do is eliminate some tasks, erode some tasks and create new tasks,” Sanjay tells Digital Edge in an interview.

According to the 2020 The Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs worldwide are projected to be replaced by AI by 2025. However, the report also highlights the potential for AI to create 97 million new roles. It is worth noting that these findings predate the mainstream integration of AI, exemplified by developments like ChatGPT.

So, individuals who adeptly upskill in response to technological advancements, seize command of AI and leverage the technology to their benefit will be positioned to retain their employment, he says.

“Employment refugees face the imminent challenge posed by AI. As AI proves to be presenting both risks and opportunities across diverse sectors, its most significant impact is felt in the workforce.”

AI is really creating a new appetite for learning, Sanjay points out. This is the reason he has been advocating for short-term master’s degrees as a means of staying ahead of the curve and fostering adaptability. In his view, this commitment to ongoing education not only secures individual professional growth but also enhances a country’s thought leadership.

As AI is trained on large language models (LLMs), job displacement is a distant concern amid heightened scrutiny. Sanjay asserts that the oversight and control of technology will continue to rest in human hands, necessitating the ongoing presence of AI and data science experts in the industry.

“Generative AI, to me, is revolutionary. But so are other innovations, like IoT (the Internet of Things), RFID (radio-frequency identification), data science and autonomous vehicles. Everyone focuses on autonomous cars and robotics but planes have been autonomous for decades,” he says.

“In class, if my students can write an essay with ChatGPT and get it right, it means I’m not asking the right questions. I should be able to ask questions or provide questions in a framework or a model where I am testing the limits of the students. I don’t think we should look at GPT as plagiarism. I think we should look at GPT as a way to change our education system.”

As these technologies become mainstream and change the world, it is crucial to figure out how to live with them and use them. However, these technologies are not infallible, so human beings are very necessary to manage them, he stresses.

“In the 1960s, when the automatic teller machine (ATM) was introduced, folks initially thought, ‘Oh my god, this will replace all the bank teller jobs’. But bank teller jobs hadn’t gone away by the late 1970s. When ATMs were more prevalent, bank tellers started selling mortgages and other [financial] instruments,” Sanjay points out.

“Now, the good news is they had a few years to adapt to that change. Most bank tellers had undergraduate degrees and ATMs had the courtesy of expanding slowly over 15 years. So there was time for that migration. [But today] AI is not being as good. Yes, that’s the problem. So you can’t have the organic shift happen. It’s inorganic. So, the intervention has to be inorganic and that’s a challenge.

“You think it’s going to happen six months from now until you suddenly realise it’s happened. It is already happening. So, as William Gibson said, ‘The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed’.”

To ready oneself for this persistent transformation, it is essential to engage in continuous learning — which, according to Sanjay, goes beyond conventional tertiary education. This comes back to harnessing a progressive mindset, he says and asserts that thought leadership is the key to advancing knowledge.

Upon assuming the role of dean at ASB earlier this year, following more than two decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he held various positions including vice-president of open learning, Sanjay saw a fundamental need to reimagine the education system. From primary and secondary to tertiary and what he terms “quaternary” education, he believes a comprehensive rethink is imperative.

Primarily, the quaternary education approach is hybrid. Sanjay highlights that the hybrid model does not solely involve online or virtual lectures. Instead, it encompasses a blend of learning content via video, active participation in discussions and potentially undertaking an internal apprenticeship at a company. This multifaceted approach aims to mould students into experts in a new subject over time, aligned with the educational direction promoted by ASB.

“The idea of quaternary education is that it is the learning gym that every human being is going to have to go to three times a week, just to stay abreast. But really, the MBA [at ASB] is the big thing of what I call quaternary education, which is staying ahead of the tsunami of change,” he says

At ASB, Sanjay redesigned the one-year Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme that strikes a balance between theory and practice. It combines the pedagogy of the MIT Sloan School of Management with the expertise of Bank Negara Malaysia, making for a comprehensive business education.

ASB is an educational institution established through a collaboration between Bank Negara and the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2015 by former central bank governor Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz and former dean of MIT Sloan and co-chair of the ASB board of governors Professor Richard Schmalensee.

The school has also introduced the Executive MBA Programme, which is similar to MIT’s MicroMasters course, which Sanjay conceived in 2015 that allows working professionals to pursue master’s degree level education remotely and has been adopted by more than 25 universities worldwide with over 50 programmes.

“AI is going to create what I call job refugees. When AI changes jobs, then people have to move from one job to another. Then these refugees need boats and that boat is education. But the problem is, not everyone can leave their jobs or your life circumstances don’t allow you to go off for a year to train on AI. [But] ASB happens to have a very, very flourishing executive education,” he says.

“We need to have a much more hybrid, much more agile education that allows them to move into an agile future or a gig future. This gig future deserves a gig education system that doesn’t exist today. So, we’re going to take advantage of pedagogy. And because it’s hybrid, we will make it available to folks in the workforce. So, this is not just about ASB. I think this needs to be a worldwide transformation.”

The Executive MBA spans 16 months and incorporates a combination of modular and hybrid weekend classes tailored to accommodate the schedules of working professionals and entrepreneurs.

“These are not Zoom lectures necessarily. This is more a combination of learning the content through video, but then engaging with real life people in discussions and perhaps doing an internal apprenticeship in the company so that over time, you become an expert on a new topic,” says Sanjay.

“For an intensive 12-month MBA programme, you’re getting an M7 [the seven elite US business schools] experience, which is valuable in the long run, with the rise of all these emerging technologies.”

To prepare for this, core modules immerse students in IoT, AI, biotechnology and blockchain, among others. Students learn from a cohort of thought leaders, combining the expertise of the MIT Sloan faculty with the regional knowledge of ASB staff.

When asked what led him to take on the offer to lead ASB, Sanjay says his interest in exploring new challenges was piqued by the societal shifts after the pandemic, characterised by a widespread shift to digitalisation and significant technological changes involving AI, job transitions and innovation.

The rapid evolution of technology has led to a plummeting half-life of skills. This, coupled with the realisation of the critical need for educational institutions to be tailored to the current times, prompted him to consider ASB’s unique position as a youthful faculty offering master’s degree level education.

Believing in the future potential of Asia and recognising ASB’s standing, he was drawn to its MIT collaboration.

“I think Malaysia has an opportunity to be methodical to invest and to actualise it rather than simply dream about it. And Malaysia is at a unique intersection of space and time because of the growth of Southeast Asia. It is still relatively inexpensive compared with Singapore, for example, but has a huge opportunity to grow its corporate sector and become a global hub,” he says.

Sanjay, who holds a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, started his career as an engineer in the North Sea. He moved to MIT in 1996 and throughout his illustrious teaching career, he spearheaded the development of crucial technologies underpinning RFID standards and IoT, accumulated more than 20 patents in these fields and authored over 75 scientific publications.

Beyond the classroom, he assumes a strategic role, contributing his expertise as a board member for numerous companies.

Hailing from a humble family rooted in science-related professions, with a great-grandfather who was an engineer and a father who was a nuclear physicist, Sanjay was immersed in science from his early years.

“I grew up in India. I did my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, received my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and went on to work in the field. Later, I pursued my master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon and PhD at Berkeley,” he says.

Sanjay’s master’s degree thesis was in the area of operations research, while his PhD was in the area of automation.

“During my PhD [at Berkeley], I was inventing stuff and innovating. I was involved with a group of students there and was informally teaching them. Then, I found that the research part galvanised me.”

Reflecting on his RFID journey, Sanjay shared in a 2015 MIT interview that back in 1998, his colleague and friend David Brock had drawn him into the realm of RFID, igniting a curiosity to explore its untapped potential.

In the early 1990s, IBM engineers pioneered an ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID system, as reported by the RFID Journal. This system, offering an extended read range of up to 20ft under optimal conditions and faster data transfer, was initially tested in pilot programmes with US-based supermarket giant Walmart. However, IBM chose not to commercialise this technology due to its high cost.

The UHF RFID underwent a transformative shift in 1999 when the Uniform Code Council, EAN International, Procter & Gamble and Gillette collaborated to establish the Auto-ID Center at MIT.

During this period, Brock and Sanjay were engaged in research, exploring the feasibility of affixing low-cost RFID tags to all products for supply chain tracking. Their innovative approach involved imprinting only a serial number on the tag to maintain cost-effectiveness. By employing a basic microchip with limited data storage capacity, they aimed to create a more economical solution compared with a more intricate chip with greater memory capabilities.

Data associated with the serial number on the tag would be stored in a database that would be accessible on the internet.

“We kind of changed the way people thought about RFID in the supply chain. Previously, tags were a mobile database that carried information on the product or container they were on with them as they travelled. Then, we pivoted it into a networking technology by linking objects to the internet through the tag,” says Sanjay.

This shift held significant implications for businesses. Clients, for example, gained the ability to track the location of inventory in vast spaces such as warehouses and retail outlets. This technological advancement proved instrumental in reducing human errors during stock audits, eliminating incidents of lost or stolen merchandise and optimising the overall efficiency of inventory management procedures.

Reflecting on the evolution of UHF RFIDs over the past two decades, Sanjay notes, “RFID has changed and will change in the coming years, just like other technological innovations. We change, adapt and move on.”

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