Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?
Tech companies that are cutting jobs and leaning more on artificial intelligence are also disrupting themselves.Amazon’s Chief Executive Andy Jassy said last month that he expects the e-commerce giant will shrink its workforce as employees “get efficiency gains from using AI extensively.”At Salesforce, a software company that helps businesses manage customer relationships, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said last week that AI is already doing 30% to 50% of the company’s work.Other tech leaders have chimed in before.Earlier this year, Anthropic, an AI startup, flashed a big warning: AI could wipe out more than half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.Ready or not, AI is reshaping, displacing and creating new roles as technology’s impact on the job market ripples across multiple sectors.
The AI frenzy has fueled a lot of anxiety from workers who fear their jobs could be automated.Roughly half of U.S.
workers are worried about how AI may be used in the workplace in the future and few think AI will lead to more job opportunities in the long run, according to a Pew Research Center report.The heightened fear comes as major tech companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Meta cut workers, push for more efficiency and promote their AI tools.Tech companies have rolled out AI-powered features that can generate code, analyze data, develop apps and help complete other tedious tasks.“AI isn’t just taking jobs.
It’s really rewriting the rule book on what work even looks like right now,” said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a company based in Folsom, Calif., that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers.Exactly how big of a disruption AI will have on the job market is still being debated.Executives for OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT, have pushed back against the prediction that a massive white-collar job bloodbath is comin...