CEOs are now confronting the issue of whether AI eliminates employment. They are currently making forecasts about the potential depth of those cuts.
According to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley, who spoke with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, artificial intelligence will replace literally half of all white-collar jobs in the United States. Many individuals in white-collar jobs will be left behind by AI.
Marianne Lake, CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s enormous consumer and community division, warned investors in May that the bank’s operations person count might drop by 10% in the coming years as the company implements new AI capabilities.
The remarks are in line with previous employment warnings from executives at Anthropic, Amazon, and other businesses. Because of the “once-in-a-lifetime” AI technology, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy predicted in a June message to staff that the company’s whole corporate personnel will be reduced in the upcoming years.
According to Jassy, “we will need more people doing other types of jobs and fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.”
In a May interview with Axios, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that half of all entry-level jobs might vanish between one to five years, leading to 10% to 20% unemployment in the United States. He called on government representatives and business leaders to quit “sugarcoating” the issue.
Among the most incisive remarks made by a major American executive outside of Silicon Valley to date are those made by the CEO of Ford. His comments show how many leaders are beginning to understand the possible human cost of the technology. White-collar employment might disappear, but few business executives have wanted to openly admit this fact up until this point.
CEOs frequently use the fact that innovation has traditionally produced a variety of new positions as a buffer when asked about job losses during interviews.
But in private, CEOs have been chatting for months about how their companies could probably be operated with a smaller number of employees. To make processes as lean and efficient as possible, technologies like robots, AI, and automation software are being introduced.
Professionals will have to acknowledge that AI will change very few roles. This spring, the CEO of Fiverr, a freelancing marketplace, Micha Kaufman, sent a note to his employees.
He wrote, “This is a wake-up call.” “AI is coming for you whether you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer service representative, salesperson, or finance professional.”
Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, recently informed employees that the business will not hire any new employees until management could demonstrate that artificial intelligence is incapable of performing the job.
At technological organizations, for instance, some executives are planning to further deconstruct positions, combining the functions of software engineer and product manager into a single post. Others, like Moderna, a company that makes Covid vaccines, have urged employees to start new projects or products without hiring more people.
“I believe it will eliminate a lot more jobs than the general public believes,” James Reinhart, CEO of ThredUp, an online marketplace for used goods, stated during a June investor conference.
According to business consultants, CEOs’ perspectives on AI are shifting practically weekly as they obtain a deeper understanding of what the technology can do—and when they observe their counterparts aggressively revising recruiting plans or flattening organizational structures.
Some technology leaders believe the worries are exaggerated. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, told that he does not believe the impact on entry-level jobs would be as immediate and widespread as some forecast. According to Lightcap, there is no indication that individuals are replacing entry-level positions on a large scale.
He admitted, however, that job displacement will occur, and that any new technology might cause labor market upheavals.
According to International Business Machines CEO Arvind Krishna, the business deployed artificial intelligence to replace the labor of a few hundred human resources employees. However, he emphasized that the firm has employed additional programmers and salesmen.
The chief financial officer of AT&T, Pascal Desroches, stated in an interview last month that there is still a lot of uncertainty regarding how AI will change the nature of labor, but that previous technology revolutions have demonstrated that new occupations frequently arise.
According to him, it’s difficult to state categorically that “we’re going to have fewer employees who are going to be more productive.” “We’re just not sure.”
