IBM’s Future Hiring Policy Is Proof That The AI Takeover Is Not Folklore

IBM Set To Pause Hiring For Jobs AI Can Do

Speaking to Bloomberg on Monday 1st May, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna provided some insight on the company’s plans as far as jobs and AI are concerned. According to the CEO, International Business Machines Corp (IBM) expects to gradually suspend select roles in the company and replace them with artificial intelligence in the next few years.

In the interview, Krishna said that the suspended roles will include non-customer-facing back-office functions such as human resources. According to him, these roles amount to roughly 26,000 employees for IBM.

“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” he said. This would mean that roughly 7,800 jobs will be lost and replaced directly by AI models.

A spokesperson for IBM claimed that the reduction in question is not necessarily about firing or laying off employees and replacing them with AI. Instead, positions or roles vacated by attrition will not be replaced with new human employees instead AI will take over.

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The comments of IBM’s Krishna come at a time when the AI frenzy has the world excited but at the same time afraid of the consequences. There are talks on how AI should be regulated as it develops with better and stronger models being launched everywhere.

However, as much as the development of AI is exciting, the gloomy side of it all includes the threat it poses to things such as data security and privacy as well as human jobs. So these claims by Krishna while showing that the AI “takeover” is here and not a future problem, are nothing new.

Just last month, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI made said that ChatGPT, among other AI models will eliminate a lot of current jobs. If anything, Krishna’s comments are a realization of Altman’s prediction.

According to Altman, “It (ChatGPT), is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true.” He went on to reiterate that even developers “are a little bit scared of this (technology).”

As Krishna said, AI will replace non-customer-facing back-office functions such as human resources.

This is consistent with a statement by Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology in the New York Post. Shi said, “AI is replacing the white-collar workers. I don’t think anyone can stop that.”

Some other jobs that are at great risk due to AI include, the finance sector, software engineering, journalism, graphic design, and even law. While replacing jobs is the most concerning issue, there is another, which is lower wages.

Carl Benedikt Frey, future of-work director at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, told BBC News that the introduction of new technology might not necessarily mean fewer jobs but rather lower wages as it will make said jobs easier as well as provide competition for the already existing workforce.