IBM’s chief executive officer expects one-third of around 26,000 roles to get replaced by AI over the next five years.
American multinational tech corporation IBM, short for International Business Machines, is reportedly planning to pause hiring for roles that could be replaced by artificial intelligence, the company’s chief Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday. Around 7,800 jobs in the company could be replaced by AI and automation in the coming years, the report added.
Krishna said in the interview that hiring in back-office functions like human resources will either be suspended or slowed. The reduction will primarily affect non-customer-facing jobs at IBM, which currently employs around 26,000 employees. Out of these, the IBM CEO expects 30% of roles to get replaced by AI over the next five years.
Meaning, roughly around 7,800 posts could be replaced by AI. This does not include filling empty roles when employees leave on their own. Krishna sees “mundane tasks” to get fully automated, including providing employment verification letters or moving employees between the departments. However, specific duties of human resource departments like assessing the productivity and composition of the workforce would not be replaced by AI in the coming ten years.
Krishna’s comments come at a time when AI remains a hot topic across the globe. The credit of which can be attributed to OpenAI’s AI bot ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm since its launch in November last year due to its human-like responses. From poetry to generating codes to sentiment analysis, ChatGPT can do it all. However, training data and knowledge cutoff of OpenAI’s chatbot is limited until 2021. Meaning, responses, and knowledge of ChatGPT are based on the information available up until that point.
OpenAI, the parent of the AI-based text generator, has a “multimillion-dollar investment” by American tech major Microsoft. Several big players like Google and Baidu gearing up to emulate the success of OpenAI chatbot. Last month, Russian lender Sberbank announced that it has developed a technology named Gigachat as a rival to ChatGPT.
