Indian American Billionaire CEO Says Half Of These Jobs Will Disappear

Global cybersecurity major Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora plans to shrink his marketing, finance, and HR teams by half over the next three years on account of AI becoming more capable.

"My rule of thumb is that in the next three years, we'll probably have half the people in G&A (General and Administrative) type activities in companies. Things like marketing, things like finance, things like HR," Arora recently said in a podcast.

"Because there's a lot of process management there. And a lot of process management can be made more intelligent using some version of an adapted future AI application for lack of a better word."

Arora, who was once the highest paid employee at Google, believes SaaS (software as a service) applications will be replaced by AI applications that are more agentic or autonomous in nature.

"The difference being, SaaS applications have no opinion. AI applications will have opinions. And that's a fundamental rethink we need from a workflow perspective, he said.

The billionaire CEO - who graduated from IIT (BHU) Varanasi before migrating to the US for further studies and a stellar career that included a decade at Google - explained that advanced AI assistants will increasingly have an opinion and can look at a marketing copy for instance and say: "I looked at your copy, it sucks. It's not good enough. It's not consistent with the tone of your (brand) voice. Here's what I will recommend. That'll make my average employee much smarter than they were today"

"Then I don't need so many of them because they're (AI systems) doing most of the work for you.

Currently, Palo Alto Networks has around 600 people in marketing, according to Arora.

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As AI advances, Arora believes, the demand for technical and sales resources will increase.

"Because if your product's really good, you need more people to go out there and cover the universe because not enough people know about it," he said, while adding that "more AI savvy" resources will be in demand.

The biggest challenge right now according to Arora is that "90% of the enterprise employees are not AI savvy." He urged these people to learn to be AI savvy on their own. Over the next three years, Arora hopes to have "enough" AI savvy people at Palo Alto Networks whose market cap is around $287 billion.

"I think we're back to a Darwinian moment where everybody has to figure out who's really good."

Over the last couple of years several organisations have laid off thousands of employees across the board on account of AI restructuring. These include the likes of Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon, Oracle, and Cognizant, among others.