Fascinating or disquieting, AI promises to revolutionize tomorrow’s professional world. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Work Report, 85% of organizations see the accelerated adoption of new AI technologies as one of the most important levers of transformation over the next five years. However, in terms of employment, the immense potential of AI promises a burst of creative destruction that we are going to have to handle with care. How artificial intelligence will impact jobs?
Let us discover this!
A changing labor market
On the labor market, the AI tools currently being introduced will have a profound impact, leading to the eventual elimination of many jobs and the restructuring of many others.
These job losses will be partially offset by the creation of new positions, but will in any case require rapid adaptation in many companies.
The effect will be particularly marked among “knowledge” workers, who until now have been shielded from the advances of automation. This is about to change…
The shock of generative AI
Catapulted to prominence with the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI has sent shockwaves through the enterprise.
Unlike other forms of AI, most of which have hitherto been designed to perform predefined tasks or provide predictions to aid decision-making, generative AI enables original creations in the form of text, images, music, scripts (lines of code) or even videos to be produced from an existing dataset, mimicking pre-existing patterns or styles to produce new, coherent content.
According to a study by KPMG, 72% of US CEOs consider investment in generative AI to be a top priority, despite uncertain economic conditions and the ethical issues raised by this new branch of AI in terms of job security and personal data protection.
What’s more, 62% of those surveyed expect to see a return on their investments in generative AI within the next five years.
Nevertheless, in concrete terms, what is the expected impact of generative AI on employment?
Will AI kill jobs?
Threat of mass unemployment or opportunity for reinvention?
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023, artificial intelligence is expected to automate 42% of business and administrative tasks by 2027.
According to a study by UK firm Evercore ISI, relayed by Harvard Business Review, almost all jobs are or will be impacted by AI in one way or another. However, the widespread replacement of human workers by AI seems an almost impossible prospect.
In fact, it’s not so much a question of which jobs are likely to be destroyed (replaced) by generative AI, but of exploring how AI’s new “creative” capabilities can strengthen various corporate functions, providing tools to improve the productivity of workers, whose analytical and cognitive abilities will remain indispensable for “manually” correcting and optimizing AI-generated proposals.
According to a study by Harvard Business School and the Boston Consulting Group into the potential of ChatGPT for realistic, complex and knowledge-intensive tasks, using OpenAI’s tool would deliver significant productivity gains: conducted on 758 consultants, the study shows that consultants using AI completed on average 12% more tasks than the control group, and produced results of 40% higher quality. But above all, this study shows that the most important skill to have, in order to achieve the best results, is to know how to determine which tasks can be easily accomplished using generative AI, and which tasks fall outside the scope of current AI capabilities.
New prospects opened up by AI
According to Iavor Bojinov, researcher and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, the automation of tasks such as note-taking, summarizing documents or drafting personalized messages will enable “knowledge” professions to focus on high value-added activities requiring exclusively human skills, such as interpreting implicit references, using emotional intelligence, taking moral and ethical considerations into account, or exercising creativity and innovation.
Rather than resisting AI, the researcher invites workers to explore and exploit its potential, seeing it not as a competitor, but as a valuable tool for amplifying their capabilities and productivity.
This proactive stance is essential if we are to adapt to the inevitable changes taking place in the world of work.
Which sectors are emerging or growing thanks to AI?
Understanding what artificial intelligence can and cannot do helps to determine which industries (and, within those industries, which professions) are most likely to be impacted by AI. The verdict? The functions most affected are legal professions (45.2% of jobs potentially impacted), IT and mathematics-related professions (44.8%), and business administration and finance-related functions (44.6%).
Overall, most technologies are expected to have a net positive impact on employment over the next five years, with the number of jobs created outweighing the number potentially destroyed by generative AI, which presents itself more as a productivity gas pedal than as a replacement for service sector workers. This optimistic view is confirmed by a recent note from the International Labour Organization on the effects of the latest advances in generative AI in various countries, which suggests that most jobs will only be partially impacted by these advances, and that they will instead have positive repercussions in terms of quality, productivity and autonomy. In addition, digital platforms, applications, e-commerce and the development of artificial intelligence technologies are all emerging or fast-growing sectors that will generate significant employment opportunities.
Which jobs of the future will benefit from AI?
The new jobs created or strengthened by generative AI will include developer, data scientist (specializing in data collection and analysis), financial analyst specialized in AI, Prompt engineer (specializing in formulating queries to make the most of the capabilities of generative AI tools), and also AI Ethics Manager, whose core job will be to assess the ethical risks associated with the use of new AI tools.
However, beyond these professions entirely rooted in artificial intelligence, other functions and jobs potentially “threatened” by generative AI could also benefit, provided the professionals concerned train and adapt to the powerful capabilities of these tools. This is the case for copywriters and translators, graphic designers, web analytics consultants, and many other professions for which generative AI is likely to create significant time and efficiency gains, by enabling these professionals to focus their energies on the analytical and creative aspects of their profession.
Read also: Prompt engineering in AI: New star of digital marketing and SEO?