30% of non-customer-facing roles could be automated
A news story featured on Bloomberg News has reported that IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna has said that the firm expects to pause hiring for new roles, alongside plans to replace roughly 7,800 jobs with AI systems.
Hiring specifically for back-office functions such as HR will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.
“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period”, Krishna was quoted as saying in the publication.
Employees concerned about losing their jobs to AI
The leap forward in AI technology has for months been the subject of divisive discussion among professionals.
As reported in TALiNT International last week, tools such as ChatGPT are pushing the boundaries of technology’s place in society, and the ramifications for the future of human-centric jobs remains largely unknown – this could largely affect the HR industry. While experts have insisted that such tools are there to assist humans, not replace them, it seems that a huge portion of the workforce simply don’t believe this to be true.
In fact, a massive 42% of professionals believe that AI will replace jobs in their area of work, according to data from AtlasVPN.
It’s true that AI tools already help automate tasks, collect and analyse data, create graphic designs, or handle basic customer queries, yet many fear that the ability to scour masses of data at lightning speed and process it into reports or event copy will effectively make humans redundant.
