IBM to Suspend Hiring, Plans to Replace Humans With AI in Thousands of Jobs

By Jacob J
May 2, 2023 14:22 +08

Tech major International Business Machines Corp (IBM) has a laid out a strategy under which artificial intelligence (AI) will replace thousands of human job roles in the company in the future.

The plan is to either slow or even suspend hiring in jobs that are not customer-facing. IBM calculates that there are at least 26,000 such job roles in the company that fall in the category that includes mainly back-office functions like human resources.

According to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, the company can replace at least one-third of such jobs with artificial intelligence. "I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," Krishna told Bloomberg News. This means that roughly 8,000 jobs in the company will be subsumed by artificial intelligence in the next fie years.

ChatGPT Impact

Though there has been the buzz about artificial intelligence replacing human roles, the launch of ChatGPT at the end of last year accelerated this possibility. The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in December last year stunned the artificial intelligence followers as it could carry out a multitude of tasks including writing essays, solving mathematical questions, writing software codes and even creating games, all by uncannily mimicking human behavior.

More Investment in Artificial Intelligence

Following the buzz the tool created, Google parent Alphabet said it was boosting its AI research and followed it up with the launch of its own ChatGPT rival Bard. Microsoft also announced plans to make huge investments in the artificial intelligence field, suggesting huge competition in the field. In February, Chinese Internet giant Baidu unveiled its artificial intelligence chatbot, which is named 'Wenxin Yiyan' in Chinese or 'ERNIE' in English. Last month, Amazon said the company will invest heavily in artificial intelligence in the aftermath of the huge success of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Government Moves Around the World

Countries around the world are formulating policies to regulate the new tool. Japan signaled last month it was planning wider adoption of ChatGPT. The development came amid concerns by Japanese corporates about the integration of the game-changing AI tool into their work. Also in April, Chinese cyberspace regulators issued draft regulations for managing generative artificial intelligence in the wake of increasing popularity and booming investment in the segment following the buzz made by OpenAI's ChatGPT. In the US, the Commerce Department has moved in the direction of AI regulation. The department is moving in to set up rules for artificial intelligence tools. US lawmakers have already introduced more than 100 AI-related pieces of legislation since 2021, a Guardian report said.

The launch of ChatGPT drove home the idea that AI bots can perform a multitude of tasks. It has been proven to be able to produce increasingly sophisticated written content, including legal documents and even author legislation. It can also write a children's book, cover letters and even help students cheat on their essays. The bot also writes computer code to program applications and software, check human coders' language for errors and transform ideas from plain English into programming language.

According to researchers, ChatGPT and similar advanced AI bots will replace humans in several jobs in the future. The following are some of them, as per a Yahoo Finance report.

1. Programming, Software Engineers : Tech jobs like web developers, computer programmers, data scientists and coders can be replaced by AI technologies. Madgavkar said ChatGPT can produce faster coding with relative accuracy than humans.

2. Media: AI tools can disrupt jobs in content creation. The expert highlighted that ChatGPT is able to read, write and understand text-based data. She explained that analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of language based data and information is a skill that one would expect AI technologies to ramp up on. As such, journalism, creative writing and technical writing jobs would be replaced. It should be noted that CNET, a tech news platform, used an AI tool like ChatGPT to write dozens of articles and BuzzFeed is set to use tech from the ChatGPT maker to generate new forms of content.

3. Legal Industry: Paralegals, legal assistants, and language-oriented roles are susceptible to automation. Madgavkar said data is quite structured, very language-oriented, and quite amendable to generative AI. But AI won't be able to fully automate these jobs as it requires a degree of human judgment to understand what the client wants. "It's like a bit of productivity boost that some of these occupations might get, because you can use tools that actually do it better," Madgavkar said.

4. Market Research Analysts: A senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Mark Muro believes market research jobs would be taken over by AI tools because artificial intelligence is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes. Market research analysts collect data, identify trends within the data and use the results to create effective marketing campaigns. Muro said this can be handled well by AI.

5. Finance Jobs: These are mainly to do with number crunching. Jobs, such as financial analyst, and personal financial advisor that require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be affected by AI. Muro pointed out that AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments in a portfolio are doing better and worse, use various other forms of data and forecast a better investment mix.

6. Traders: Wall Street jobs can be replaced by AI as its all about data, figures and forecasts. This can be better done by AI than humans who are hired right out of college and take huge amounts of salary.

7. Teachers: After students used ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, Pengcheng Shi from Rochester Institute of Technology, believes teachers should worry about their jobs. He said ChatGPT can easily teach classes and it can be trained to do so, that is, after the tool has been improved â€" bugs and inaccuracies gotten rid off

8. Graphic Designers: AI is already being used to create and generate images. One good example is DALL-E. An article in Harvard Business Review stated that upskilling millions of people in their ability to create and manipulate images will have profound impact on the economy. "Recent advances in AI will usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for those whose jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt."

9: Customer Service: Jobs in customer service will definitely be affected. Companies are already deployed automatic answering systems or Chatbots to direct calls and sort out matters.

10. Accountants: This profession also deals with number crunching and balance sheets which can be easily achieved by AI. Brett Caraway, associate professor with the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, said technology hasn't put everybody out of job yet, but it does put some people out of a job. He explained that it is something new and will be interesting to see how disruptive and painful it would be for employment and politics.

According to a survey, 51 percent of employers are considering cutting roles and looking to deploy ChatGPT in their marketing and PR departments. Furthermore, the recent layoffs in Google and Microsoft cited focus on AI and automation. There are also concerns about the loss of human touch. But then this is just the beginning, it's yet to be seen how far robotics and AI will go.

Related topics : Artificial intelligence