Reports point to jobs in flux as AI continues to grow

Many execs have long insisted that AI is here to augment rather than replace human workers. Or that jobs made obsolete by AI will be offset by new roles the technology creates. But as LLMs evolve, could that math be changing?

Recent reports paint perhaps a more troubling picture of the impact that advanced AI capabilities could have on jobs. While many businesses are still figuring out how generative AI fits into their operations, execs are already starting to consider the tech as a factor in hiring.

The wave of reports also comes as experts expect AI systems to grow more autonomous, as agents that can perform routine tasks replace chatbots as the object of business fixation.

Here’s a breakdown:

• The World Economic Forum (WEF) found that 41% of employers surveyed expect to downsize their workforces “where AI can replicate people’s work” in the next five years. Around 22% of today’s jobs may disappear due to AI, with 170 million roles created and 92 million lost for a net growth of 78 million.
  
  Like other surveys have shown, office jobs are generally more at risk than in previous waves of tech disruption. “The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining job roles, a first-time prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI’s increasing capacity to perform knowledge work,” according to the WEF report.
  
• Another report from Bloomberg Intelligence projects that “global banks will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years” as AI becomes more able to perform tasks currently handled by human workers. Banking tech execs expect to cut 3% of the workforce, particularly jobs involving rote tasks.
  
  “Any jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at risk,” report author and BI senior analyst Tomasz Noetzel said. “But AI will not eliminate them fully; rather, it will lead to workforce transformation.”
  
• A survey of 1,600 employers and employees from Hult International Business School found that 37% of employers would rather hire AI or robots than recent college grads, because of the latter’s general lack of preparedness for the job world.

Some positive news: Despite the volatility in the jobs market, many experts still predict net growth in sheer numbers, including the WEF, which found that jobs for big data specialists, fintech engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, and software and application developers were poised to grow the most.

Workday VP of AI Kathy Pham said the HR and finance platform’s recent research has also identified some “uniquely human” skills that can’t be replaced by AI—including moral judgment, relationship building, and emotional intelligence.

“There’s an opportunity to take the experiences we’ve had the past few years [and] do a deep reflection on which parts of these jobs are parts that can be automated, and then which parts of the job are parts that are very human,” Pham told Tech Brew.

She said that as AI changes the job market, Workday as a platform is more focused on skills within jobs rather than education or background. Workday’s research suggests that replacement will likely hit various tasks within roles rather than whole job functions.

“Some of those tasks are really, really, really, really well-positioned to be automated,” Pham said. “And other parts of our jobs are just not. So that’s where I hope leaders go, where you figure out which parts of those jobs—yeah, AI works there, and then, which parts of the job are not…and that’ll be the really fun part: to find and then to foster the parts that are not going to be automated.”