Division Head, Footwear and Accessories, Malika International, Gurgaon, Haryana
From Artificial Intelligence (AI) to E-commerce, Digitization has created possibilities in the business world for companies, entrepreneurs and self-employed workers, for new opportunities and innovation. It has enabled companies to bring perfect products and services reaching larger and remote markets making customers happy by enhancing their daily life. It has enabled remote working which has made free-lancing popular and preferable and made both internal and external communication instant, making action and reaction to opportunities and problems much faster. While there is no end to the benefits of digitization, it also has some pitfalls which need to be worked upon to benefit from it sustainably. E-commerce and deep discounting done by platforms like Amazon and Flipkart have left competing small traditional businesses and retail giants bankrupt and out of business. According to the Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF), by 2025 more than half of all current workplace tasks will be taken over by robots as compared to 29% currently. While experts say, that AI will be creating much more jobs than it takes, the key to this is education for humans to overtake technology. This overlooks the rural workforce such as women working in farmlands losing their jobs due to modern machinery, who have limited or no access to high quality education and will take a very long time to catch up with technology to get employed. In this paper, we will be looking at the extent to which digitization has affected traditional businesses and employment opportunities and what is being done to cope with it.
Digitization, Retail Apocalypse, E-commerce, Deep Discounting, Artificial Intelligence, Unemployment
