To say there’s anxiety around what AI will mean for jobs is an understatement.
But there are nuanced ways to think about it and, in some sense, less to worry about than we might have thought otherwise.
“The good news is that there’s not a single job anywhere that AI can perform all of the skills required for that job,” Indeed CEO Chris Hyams told the audience at Coins2Day’s Workplace Innovation Summit, describing the findings of Indeed’s labor economists. “It doesn’t mean it won’t replace workers, but AI can’t completely replace a job.”
Simultaneously, Indeed’s findings have also shown that “for about two-thirds of all jobs, 50% or more of those skills are things that today’s generative AI can do reasonably well, or very well.”
These two seemingly at-odds findings point to a seismic shift underway—not a simple scenario where entire sectors vanish overnight, but a far more complex transformation where jobs are undeniably evolving.
“What that says is that pretty much every job is going to change if it’s not changing already,” said Hyams onstage. “It’s going to happen rapidly. I’m personally expecting—I’ve been doing this for a little over 30 years—that if you look at the change that’s happened because of the Internet to pretty much every line of work, there are a handful of occupations over the next three years that will see 30 years of change. So, what we’re seeing is that people are going to have to adapt very, very quickly to how they work, but also how they hire and how they find jobs.”
Julia Villagra, OpenAI Chief People Officer, shares Hyams’ perspective that a lot is about to change.
“I think one of the things that we need to do at this moment is actually to start changing the way we talk about job replacement,” Villagra told the audience. “I think this is really about something bigger than that. It’s about a reimagination of jobs. It’s about redistribution of how we work. And as a people person and an optimist, I have a lot of faith and optimism about how humans throughout history have actually adapted and leveraged technology for progress.”