No one seems to know if AI will take our jobs or make us productive superstars

Mark Quinn said he lost his previous job to AI, though he doesn’t think it was a sign of a coming employment purge at the hands of bots.

Quinn was working for a generative artificial intelligence startup running a team he set up to oversee the answers the bots kicked out — the proverbial human in the loop.

Eventually, as the AI improved, the company found it could manage with a smaller, more efficient set of workers, the longtime tech exec said.

“My skill and the job I was hired to do was truly no longer needed,” Quinn told Business Insider.

Because there wasn’t another role that was a good fit for him, he left.

The idea of losing your job to a bot is scary, and some workplace thinkers have warned about it. Yet others hold a sunnier view: Whip-smart bots will take over so much that we’ll be able to add a whole lot more to our to-do lists.

The absence of a solid consensus among the tech and labor cognoscenti about AI’s impact speaks to how many questions remain and how often the answer might start with “it depends.”

“Part of it is, we honestly don’t know,” Gary Hamel, a visiting professor at London Business School who lives in Silicon Valley, told BI about the effect AI will have on jobs.

He said there are varying opinions in the AI community about whether we’re already bumping up against the limits of what large language models and GenAI can do or whether there are blockbuster sequels to come.

Hamel said we’ve often overestimated the impact of new technology on employment.

“As far as I know, over the last 50 years, only one job category in the United States has disappeared,” he said. “That is elevator operator.”

The list could grow. In 2023, Goldman Sachs said that some 300 million full-time jobs globally could be at risk of being automated. More recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that his company might not hire software engineers this year because of how much AI agents have helped boost some coders’ productivity.

“I can’t think of any roles that won’t be impacted,” Scott Russell, CEO of the tech company NICE, previously told BI about how AI will reshape work.

‘An Iron Man suit’

Adam Brotman, cofounder and co-CEO of Forum3, a boutique consulting firm that advises companies on AI adoption, told BI that he expects AI will take some jobs, change others, and lead some companies to forgo posting some roles they might once have.

“It’s this weird, ambiguous, conflicting thing,” Brotman said.

What is clear, he said, is that AI will make many workers far more productive.

“It’s going to be an Iron Man suit,” said Brotman, who once ran digital operations at Starbucks and is the former co-CEO of J. Crew.

He said the business leaders his firm talks to and who understand what AI is capable of, are asking how they can make their businesses more productive and whether they can get by without hiring as many people as a result.

Brotman expects it will take another 12 months or so of AI being on the scene for businesses to have a clearer understanding of what the technology will mean for jobs. Ultimately, he predicts there will be a fallout, yet one that’s not evenly distributed.

For a job like software development, Brotman said, AI can do a lot of the programming and quality assurance work, yet someone working with AI to generate code can also do a lot more.

He said it’s become harder to answer the question of what AI will mean for employment because, as the technology improves, many of the gains will come not just from making organizations more efficient but from helping companies innovate and create new products and lines of business.

“It’s not just about productivity. It’s about this abundance,” he said.

Ravin Jesuthasan, the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, expects there to be a “ton of dislocation” within companies and across industries that might not result in massive job losses across the US economy, but that will remake a lot of roles.

He told BI that employees will be able to get more done, but that AI will also create a lot of work.

This includes the need for people to ensure that the tech is functioning, that it’s calibrated correctly, and that the output is used in an “intelligent, ethical, responsible way,” Jesuthasan said.

Think about tasks, not jobs

Quinn, who lost his previous job to AI’s prowess, is now the senior director of AI operations for Pearl, an AI search platform for professional services that pairs GenAI with human experts to verify responses are accurate.

He said the best way to think about how AI will affect work isn’t necessarily about which jobs or industries are most at risk of being upended, but rather about the tasks and type of work that will change. Quinn, who’s held roles at Waymo, LinkedIn, Apple, and Amazon, said AI will take on many formulaic and rote tasks.

He said that, as with any tech innovation, there will be some amount of upheaval, but that people can also learn to work with AI. The focus should be on what workers can do with the extra time they’ll have.

Quinn advises companies to help build workers’ skills and embrace different ways of getting things done. Otherwise, he said, employees could get left behind.

“The longer that people sit on the sidelines wondering if this wave is coming, the more at risk they are of getting caught off guard by the undertow,” Quinn said.

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