Earlier in March, a Goldman Sachs report stated that two-thirds of jobs in the U.S. and Europe could be automated soon enough. Globally, the AI impact on employment could affect over 300 million job roles. We frequently go back and forth over the role of AI in the workplace and how it has been shifting the nature of work both for better and for worse. There are a lot of benefits from the integration of AI technology, a possible 7 percent boost to global GDP according to the report, but when paired with apprehensions about unemployment, it results in an equal amount of worry for the future.
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Surprisingly, however, not all is dark when it comes to AI adoption by the workforce. Branch, a platform known for its financial services, recently released the fifth Edition of the Branch Report, which took a closer look at the condition of the current workforce engaged in hourly work, and their experience with employment in 2023. 56 percent of the respondents seemed unconcerned about the impact of AI on work while 21 expressed worry regarding how AI could change work as we know it. 53 percent of the respondents even expressed an interest in experimenting with AI tools, making it clear that AI’s impact on employment was a complex but navigable one.
AI Impact on Employment
Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly the “next big thing” and companies appear to be on the lookout for ways to ingrain themselves as a global leader in the field of AI. Even companies that do not work in tech have had to open themselves to the possibility of using AI tools for productivity, management, and other administrative duties at the very least, even if they aren’t fully prepared for a complete evolution. Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2022 found that private investments in AI more than doubled in 2021 as compared to 2020, totalling around $93.5 billion. The research also found automation technology, such as robotic arms, was becoming cheaper and thereby more affordable, decreasing from $42,000 per arm in 2017 to $22,600 in 2021. As AI becomes more accessible, it also becomes more easy to adopt.
It is still unclear if the adoption of AI in the workplace has already led to job replacements so far. According to a survey by ResumeBuilder, 37 percent of the surveyed business leaders stated that AI had replaced workers in 2023 while 44 percent reported that layoffs RE increase in 2024 due to the potential of AI. For this to happen, AI adoption would have to occur on a scale big enough to make job roles redundant, but so far, our technology does seem limited to someone at least being required to supervise or prompt the AI processes. The level of our AI technology has not provided sufficient evidence to support the fact that it could replace workers to large degrees immediately so the concerns appear preemptive for now.
Despite the significant research in the field and early adoption of specific tech like AI tools productivity, AI use is not as accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. To invest in tech, companies will have to divert a significant part of their resources towards adopting AI and that will be difficult to accomplish for a large number of businesses. It is also quite possible that AI’s impact on employment could perhaps be reversed, potentially creating 133 million new job roles to suit the new world of labor, according to an estimate by the World Economic Forum, as reported by McKinsey. These will undoubtedly involve an entirely new range of skills as compared to the jobs that are displaced, but the potential for work might not be entirely lost.
Positive Impact of AI on Work
AI in the workplace does not end with the displacement and creation of jobs and instead extends a little further to include workplace functioning as well. There are many ways that AI tools for productivity, assessments, time management, project tracking, customer communications, etc. can be incorporated into the work that is done at an organization. AI’s impact on employment begins right from hiring, where it is becoming increasingly common for companies to use AI to filter through job applications and narrow down the list of candidates for further processing. The impact of AI on work can be seen in the simplification of admin processing after hiring and during the course of onboarding, as well as in simplifying the communication of relevant information to new hires.
AI tools for productivity can help streamline work, generate creative content, assimilate ideas, summarize meetings, consolidate feedback, track payroll, and conduct a variety of other functions that ensure a positive impact of AI on work. As things stand, the fear around AI adoption is quite realistic in the long term and employees need to start doing what they can to understand and embrace the possible overlap of AI within their industries to continue to have a relevant role no matter how AI evolves. There are quite a few distinct ways to incorporate AI into work in order to pursue efficiency and the workers who experiment with AI tools have the best chance of staying on top of the game.