Worker fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will take their jobs are beginning to bear out.
Demand for automation-prone jobs plunged 21% in the eight months following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, according to an analysis of 1.39 million job posts worldwide from July 2021 to July 2023 by Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and Imperial College London Business School.
Writers, web developers and engineers are the most-imperiled job holders. Positions in graphic design and 3-D modeling declined 17% after the release of AI image generation tools such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
“While everyone is describing the impact as AI being an ‘assistant’ that ‘augments’ their work, I see signals that we’re looking at significant displacement,” Matt Strain, who runs The Prompt consultancy, said in an email. “Sure, there will be new jobs, but many of those jobs will be filled by new people with different skills.”
A shift in skill demand toward critical thinking and creativity, researchers aid, could reshape the labor market, creating a growing chasm between “high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs.”
“AI and automation are leading to the wholesale elimination of some low-level white-collar jobs like call centers and order entry,” said David Cushman, executive research leader at HFS Research.
Industry leaders acknowledge AI tools will temporarily lead to job losses, but the rise of agentic AI from vendors like Microsoft Corp., ServiceNow Inc., Salesforce Inc. and others will eventually help create new kinds of hybrid jobs between humans and AI.
Indeed, a vast majority of companies are relying on generative AI for enhancing automation (85%), co-developing products and services (84%) and supporting code development (84%), according to new C1 poll of more than 500 IT leaders and decision makers in U.S. organizations with over 500 employees.
“Thing is, AI is only as good as the BI (Biological Intelligence) that goes into it,” technical writer Anthony Hernandez said in an email. “The AEQ (Artificial Emotional Quotient) will only be as good as the BEQ (Biological Emotional Quotient).”
Hassaan Raza, CEO of Tavus, a generative AI video-research company, believes a “human layer” will redefine AI’s role in our lives.
In three to five years, he predicts, AI agents will be virtually indistinguishable from humans – in terms of speech as well as their ability to use complex reasoning to perform tasks.
To be sure, there will still be jobs, but they will increasingly become more sophisticated, with workers managing and supervising AI agents and bots rather than completing the task themselves.
“AI reshapes jobs. It’s up to each of us to choose whether we’ll unlock the efficiencies AI offers or get left behind,” Judah Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Squark AI, said in an email. “The real opportunity is in learning and adapting to new ways of working. What the economy needs right now is upskilling and retraining to enhance and augment jobs today and create the jobs of tomorrow.”
For the most part, Cushman said, AI and automation are more about “augmenting” and “enhancing the capabilities” of workers rather than fully replacing them.
“There has been large investment in the full supply chain of AI and few people have figured out valuable things to do with it,” Matt Warden, CEO of Double Line Inc., said in an email. “This means new jobs in chip production, cloud, data preparation created on the promise of future gains.”
