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IBM To Stop Hiring Jobs AI Could Do

May 3, 2023 thehrobserver-hrobserver-ibm

There are around 260,000 workers in the back office that could be affected. IBM have recently let go about 5,000 workers in other areas; however, they continued hiring according to the CEO’s interview.

The CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, said in an interview with  Bloomberg on Monday that he is considering downsizing the tech giant’s back office workforce by nearly a third because AI is doing these jobs.

He said that his company will reduce the payroll by 7,800 jobs over several years.”These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers,” Krishna said. “I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”

There are around 260,000 workers in the back office that could be affected. IBM have recently let go about 5,000 workers in other areas; however, they continued hiring according to the CEO’s interview. 

In a statement to AFP on Tuesday, an IBM spokesman said that “there is no blanket hiring ‘pause’ in place” at the company, based in Armonk, New York.

“We’re being very selective when filling jobs that don’t directly touch our clients or technology,” the IBM spokesman added.

Goldman Sachs said in a study published in March that around 300 million jobs could be lost to AI-powered automation such as ChatGPT. The study added that one-fourth of the current work tasks in the United States and Europe could be automated.

On Monday, Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI, announced that he was leaving Google’s AI research team and criticised Microsoft for moving too quickly in making ChatGPT-style technology available.

Hinton said that competition between tech giants  has been pushing them to release new AI technologies at dangerous speeds, threatening jobs and creating  danger to society.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.

Meanwhile, Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, said in a statement: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to A.I. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

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