Leading technology company IBM announced that it would likely phase out 8,000 jobs and replace them with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in what may be one of the first waves of a major labor shift caused by the advanced technology.
The company’s CEO Arvind Krishna said that the tech giant will not hire in a number of office roles, such as human resources. The CEO said that he could “easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”
This roughly translates to almost 8,000 jobs. The company said that it would eliminate the positions via attrition.
The recent announcement may represent the tip of the iceberg for a number of white-collar jobs soon to be impacted by AI.
ICYMI: "we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work." That's 300 million jobs that could be replaced by AIhttps://t.co/gF8qBBeoq0
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 1, 2023
IBM wasn’t the only major company to announce that AI was affecting the way they do business. The file-sharing website Dropbox announced that it was laying off 500 employees, or about 16% of its payroll to be replaced by AI.
The college textbook company Chegg’s stock fell dramatically this week due to potential changes caused by AI. The company’s stock fell by nearly half Tuesday after the company’s CEO Dan Rosenweig said that the company will likely lose new customers due to “a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT.”
ChatGPT, created by the software company OpenAI, has become a rapidly successful AI chatbot.
Goldman Sachs reported that up to 300 million jobs in the United States and Europe could be directly impacted by the technology, including possible elimination.
The financial institution believes that the transition to artificial intelligence could ultimately increase the world’s economic growth but at a steep price for workers. In particular, Goldman Sachs believes that many administrative jobs, including attorneys, architects, human resources, healthcare, design and more will be affected.
Similarly, the World Economic Forum believes that a quarter of all existing jobs will be impacted by the emerging technology.
The report stated that about 75% of businesses expect to use AI in the next half-decade, at the potential expense of tens of millions of jobs.
