'How is AI Killing Jobs?': Arnab Goswami Question Sridhar Vembu on Tech Layoffs

Oracle, Meta, Amazon, Cisco, all announcing these major layoffs in the face of AI.You've been arguing that all of this is being done to accommodate and service the cost of AI itself, the cost of the hardware, the cost of the servers.So your argument is that people are being laid off by companies to service their investments in AI rather than as a productivity miracle.But what we should...AI was meant about improving productivity.So let me ask you the question on productivity.

What is Sridhar Vembu doing, as much as you can say, on this critical word of productivity?

This is not just speculation on my part.We are seeing the exact cost pressures.We have a data center right here in Mumbai.Most of our Zoho traffic either served out of Mumbai or Chennai, and we ping -pong between them.So the current server cost right now, if we buy, the same identical specification is about three to four times as expensive as six months ago.In order to serve a single Zoho user, thousands of users, we need to buy servers.

Those servers, normal servers, nothing to do with AI.They have become three to four times expensive because of memory.Memory prices went up because of AI.So AI sucked all the memory.and ordinary servers become expensive.Now we are in this uncomfortable position.

Should we have to raise the prices or should we cut some other cost?So many of the companies that face the cost pressure, we are private, so we don't have to report to Wall Street or Dalal Street all the time, so we don't have to worry about this, because we can take less profit.But companies that are public have to report profit, so they control the one item they control, which is payroll.So they lay off employees.This is actually the primary reason for a lot of layoffs.