IBM is replacing 30% of all internal jobs with AI
IBM seems to be the first company to replace human employees with AI en masse. Is this the beginning of the end?
IBM chairman Arvind Krishna said in an interview with business channel Bloomberg that IBM is now not hiring anyone whose position could potentially be taken over by AI. In total, this concerns all positions that do not involve customer contacts, around 26,000 FTEs.
Krishna estimates that about 30 percent of these jobs could be replaced by Ai and automation, he said in an interview. In the case of IBM, you are talking about just under eight thousand jobs. Some of these jobs may be lost through natural attrition.
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IBM is actually hiring more people
IBM currently employs around 260,000 people, 90 percent of whom have customer contacts. At first glance, this group has less to worry about. The question is whether this will actually take off at such a pace. After IBM announced that it would lay off 3900 people, 5000 new people were subsequently hired.
News department replaced with AI
This is the first time a major company has been candid about plans to replace workforce with AI. But other companies quietly preceded IBM. For example, Jonah Peretti, the chairman of the board of the US-large site BuzzFeed, abolished the digital newsroom and largely replaced it with AI.
Still reason for (some) optimism
But maybe we have less to worry about than it seems. Change always brings work. Also the introduction of AI. Tasks must be transferred, business processes must be organized differently. Did that happen once? Then the next job awaits, namely adapting your company to the rapidly changing market. It is difficult to imagine how an AI is able to quickly recognize trends and develop a vision from this: how to proceed.
A company cannot only consist of pure customer contact. It must also work on added value, with the help of internal people. Busy tapping and discussing nerds who won’t let pizza delivery stop them from creating the company’s next hit. It is not for nothing that it is standard practice in scrum sessions that team members are shielded from the ever-changing requirements of clients. In other words: consciously kept “internal”.
Something that costs next to nothing to make eventually becomes worthless
Because the work of AI is almost free and can be easily copied by competitors, economic value production will move to tasks that cannot (yet) be automated.
In the nineteenth century, for example, the lamplighter, a municipal worker who lit the gas lanterns in large cities, was an honorable profession. Now a single official can do this via a central control room. Exit lantern lighters. But the number of civil servants dealing with street lighting and other spatial planning matters, such as road safety, has multiplied. As always, keep your eyes open and work on your typical human skills. Fasten your seatbelts, we are going to experience a bumpy ride.
