Adaptability - The #1 Superpower For STEM Talent
By Uday Parmar, Country Director, India at inSpring
Darwin was no dummy. He knew what he was saying when he said: "It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself."
We all know that technology is changing at an unprecedented pace. Sample this. ChatGPT reached its millionth user just 5 days after launching. To put this into perspective, it took the fastest-growing tech companies like Dropbox, Spotify, and Instagram many months to reach this milestone. Facebook took 10 months, Pinterest 20 months, Twitter 24 months, and Airbnb 30 months to reach the one million users. A just released UBS study called ChatGPT "the fastest-growing consumer application in history" when it touched 100 million monthly active users in January.
Microsoft and Google have been in an AI tug-of-war for some time. Microsoft has invested $13B in OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) since 2019. With the chatbots runway success as pointed earlier, one would think it was game over for Google. But, no. On 3 Feb, Google invested ~$400B (!) in Anthropic whose language model assistant Claude should be out anytime now. And less than 48 hours back, it announced its experimental conversational AI service Bard. Long story short. Google upped its game rapidly and is now poised to go head-to-head with anyone in the world. It adapted.
Stephen Hawking said: "Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”.
I witnessed this first hand during my time with the Forensic Technology team at EY. In my 3 years there, I saw historic "cash cows" that were abandoned and new technologies that were adopted based on customer/market needs. As a company, EY has always been progressive when it came to investing in technology. In India, our AI-powered platform Digital Integrity Analytics (DIA) developed by my reporting partner Harsha was a step in adapting to the requirement of clients who wanted greater insight into their enterprise data with respect to fraud hotbeds like procurement, travel and entertainment and recruitment. We leveraged our domain expertise and tech chops to create one of the world's largest libraries of fraud test cases, leveraging NLP, AI and ML, and eventually created something that will be a blockbuster platform/ team/ revenue source in times to come. Again, we adapted.
What holds true for companies should also be true for employees, right? Which brings me to the main point I want to make.
There is a lesson here for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students. Programming languages, tools and technologies that were widely used just a few years ago may no longer be relevant today/tomorrow. On the other hand, there are new and exciting opportunities emerging in areas such as virtual reality, blockchain, quantum computing, etc. Students who are willing to upskill (read: adapt) will be better positioned to take advantage of these opportunities. You don't know what the future will bring. But if you are prepared to adapt, you will have the best shot at surviving and thriving.
Uday Parmar has 20 years in international sales and business development. He has spent a decade with marquee consulting and advisory firms like Ernst & Young, KPMG, and Boston Analytics, and another decade with technology startups that did/do cool stuff like make mobile games, augmented and virtual reality-based research platforms, and AI-based real-time decision analytics. At his current position with inSpring, Uday is dedicated to matching international STEM students in the U.S. with tech employers for their OPT (Optional Practical Training) authorized work period following their studies.