The CEO of IBM mentioned he was eyeing to downsize the tech big’s again workplace workforce by practically a 3rd as a result of these jobs are being made redundant by advances in synthetic intelligence.
In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Arvind Krishna mentioned that his firm would enact a pause in hiring in these roles, and doubtlessly cut back the payroll by 7,800 jobs over a number of years.
“These non-customer-facing roles quantity to roughly 26,000 staff,” Krishna mentioned. “I might simply see 30 p.c of that getting changed by AI and automation over a five-year interval.”
Again workplace workers are solely a fraction of IBM’s roughly 260,000 staff, and the corporate has continued to rent in sure roles, even after just lately letting go about 5,000 staff in different areas, the Bloomberg report mentioned.
In an announcement to AFP on Tuesday, an IBM spokesman cautioned that “there isn’t a blanket hiring ‘pause’ in place” on the firm, based mostly in Armonk, New York.
“We’re being very selective when filling jobs that do not instantly contact our purchasers or know-how,” the IBM spokesman added.
The event of generative AI, as demonstrated by viral purposes like ChatGPT, is making it doable to extra simply execute much less complicated work corresponding to sure human useful resource duties, information administration and different repetitive operations.
A examine by Goldman Sachs in March mentioned that as many as 300 million jobs could possibly be misplaced to AI-powered automation, and one-fourth of present work duties in the US and Europe could possibly be automated.
However whereas the discharge of ChatGPT took the world by storm late final 12 months, the know-how, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, is liable to errors and has led firms to solely entrust it with easy duties for now.
On Monday, Geoffrey Hinton, generally thought of the godfather of AI, introduced that he was leaving Google’s industry-leading AI analysis crew and criticized Microsoft for shifting too rapidly in making ChatGPT-style know-how out there.
Hinton mentioned that competitors between tech giants was pushing firms to launch new AI applied sciences at harmful speeds, threatening jobs and posing a hazard to society.
