The AI Wave: Steering Our Career in a New Era

On 15th Feb’25, I along with Kavitha hosted an in-person discussion on AI and its effect of our careers. 7 on us from diverse backgrounds could manage to attend at my home/office. We discussed a wide range of topics like how AI is helping us, challenges it brings, agentic AI, how it is shaping geo-politics, alternative careers and much more. Here is a brief summary of our more than 3 hours of discussion.

How AI is helping us ?

Everyone opined that they are using AI to get their work done faster and more efficiently. It works best when we give intelligent prompts with context. People are using it to write codes, generate email responses, building games, writing financial reports and much more. AI is going to be a great enabler for healthcare, education, agriculture and much more.

Challenges AI Brings

If everyone starts using AI for everything, what is going to happen to our thinking abilities? Would regular education be going to serve any purpose as AI would have all the knowledge available, available on the fingertips. We all agreed that we need to re-think about our children’s education.

Participants mentioned that for all the repetitive and mundane tasks AI is being used and due to that fresher’s hiring are affected. Lot of code is now being written by AI and usage of AI through the code IDEs are now being tracked. There is a mandate to use AI for coding. Companies are expecting increased productivity and that is again putting pressure back on the employees. Usage of AI is increasing to stay ahead in the respective game.

Dangers of AI

We all have seen examples of Deepfake. How easy it is now to clone anyone’s face, voice and expressions. This can be used to create divide and unrest in the society.

Every county/union is trying to take lead in the AI, which is going to create GeoPolitical tension. Each one can have their own version of AI, which can give results based on their preferences. We are already seeing this with the default model of Deepseek, which is coming from China.

Forget about countries, with decreasing cost of AI models and inferencing; any individual or group can have their own version of AI. This would give them more power which they can use with good and bad intentions. 

With AI and robotics future wars are going to be completely different.

What is coming along with AI ?

Along with AI, we are seeing advancement in Robotics, Synthetic Biology and Quantum Computing. They are coming together to form the wave of technology in which all of us would be immersed. Think about choosing the DNAs of your offspring, fighting a war with just robots, having immense computing power which breaks any form of encryption and much more.

AI is not like other technology advancement like the Cloud. It is way beyond that. Every industry, job role is going to be affected by it. It is new today but in a matter for a few years it would be invisible and would be part of every offering.

New Opportunities and Skill Diversification

During the discussion we all opined that, to stay relevant we all have to up-skill ourselves on AI. We can not be in the mode of pessimism aversion for AI – There is no way we can say that we’ll manage somehow, like we always did.

AI would definitely open up new ways at the intersection of technology, human behaviour and societal needs; but we need to be ready for that. One such field is safely and compliance auditing for AI based applications.

We also discussed having other skills to offset the dependency of the current job. One should be open to come out of the comfort zone and should be open to try out new things. We have discussed that in detail by referring to the frog and the boiling water story.

To my surprise a lot of people are thinking of going back to nature and doing farming activities in future, which is a good sign. 

Overall the discussion came out better than expected. We had a great time.

Would you like to next one ??