- Nearly half of employers agree that they’ll reduce their workforce in the next 5 years, new research from The World Economic Forum reveals. They say AI will make swaths of roles and skills obsolete.
Since the explosive launch of ChatGPT, there has been a prevailing fear among workers that employers would leverage artificial intelligence to cut costs by replacing human jobs. As it turns out, many may be right.
The World Economic Forum surveyed 1,000 global employers, who collectively employ more than 14.1 million workers across 22 industries, for its Future of Jobs report—and it found that 41% of bosses think they’ll need to reduce their workforce in the next five years.
Why? Because they predict there will be a pool of workers whose skills or roles become obsolete thanks to AI. In other words: They plan to replace human workers with chatbots, automation and large language models that can do the job faster for less.
But it’s not all bad news. A larger proportion of employers (51%) say they intend to transition staff from these dying roles into ones which are growing. It’s a task that will require swaths of workers to upskill to remain relevant.
It’s why the future looks brightest for workers with who are already equipped with AI skills. A staggering 70% of bosses surveyed plan to hire new staff with these in-demand skills.
The report echoes reams of research which has been warning workers for the last couple of years that many of them won’t be replaced by technology—but by other AI savvy workers.
Even CEOs think they’re replaceable
If it’s any consolation, it’s not just workers that bosses expect to replace with AI. A separate study from edX revealed that nearly half of CEOs believe AI could potentially replace their own jobs too.
Avital Balwit, the chief of staff at one of AI’s hottest startups, Anthropic, is one of few execs who has openly admitted her job, along with most others, are destined for obsolescence—and anyone who thinks otherwise is in denial.
“I am 25. The next three years might be the last few years that I work,” the Gen Zer wrote in a personal essay in Palladium. “I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement.”
“I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it,” Balwit explained.
Remote workers could be first to go
Research shows that the world of work is in for some serious upheaval.
The investment bank Goldman Sachs estimated that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally in the coming years. Wall Street alone could see as many as 200,000 jobs gone in the next three to five years.
In the U.K., the government is preparing for a scenario in which advances in automation will lead to increased unemployment and poverty by 2030.
Meanwhile, a McKinsey study has warned that AI could force nearly 12 million U.S. workers to switch jobs by 2030—with admin, manufacturing, and sales workers among those most likely to be impacted.
“Given the current trajectory of the technology, I expect AI to first excel at any kind of online work,” Balwit echoes. “Essentially anything that a remote worker can do, AI will do better.”
The jobs that AI will kill first? Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, software development, and contract law.
“Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models,” Balwit warns.