Boss warns thousands of IBM employees are at risk because of AI

IBM Watson wins the 2011 Jeopardy competition Photo: IBM Research

Artificial intelligence will replace thousands of office workers at IBM within five years . The IT giant's CEO predicted.

Arvind Krishna said IBM will pause or slow down recruitment in areas such as HR as many tasks are being replaced by automation.

About B IBM currently employs 26,000 people in these positions, and had about 288,000 employees at the end of last year.

“I could easily see 30 percent of that being replaced by artificial intelligence and automation over a five-year period,” Mr. Krishna told Bloomberg. This will amount to about 7,800 employees. IBM said most of the cuts will come from layoffs, not mass layoffs.

Mr Krishna's prediction is one of the first signs that a new wave of AI programs is disrupting the job market, especially white collar workers. workers.

The rapid growth of «large language models» such as ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco-based company OpenAI, has led to new fears of job losses. Bots are capable of summarizing large amounts of text, writing emails and essays, and helping to write computer code.

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Mr. Krishna said that more routine tasks like paperwork would be handled by automation rather than areas like performance analysis.

His prediction is that in This year, many high-tech companies have cut jobs and imposed a moratorium on hiring in an attempt to appease investors. In January, IBM said that about 3,900 vacancies could be cut.

Media companies Insider and BuzzFeed have turned to artificial intelligence to help create articles. Two weeks ago, BuzzFeed announced it was shutting down its newsroom, and Insider, formerly known as Business Insider, said it would cut 10% of its staff a week after it unveiled plans to use AI in its newsroom.

Hollywood writers strike on Tuesday for the first time in 15 years, in part because of concerns that studios would use artificial intelligence instead of their work.

IBM was once considered a pioneer in artificial intelligence, developing the Deep Blue computer that beat the champion Garry Kasparov's World Chess Championship in 1997 and won the American Jeopardy quiz in 2011 with his Watson chatbot.

However, the system failed to attract commercial customers. IBM sold most of its Watson Health business last year, but continues to develop Watson for areas such as financial services.