SPOTLIGHT: How AI is impacting the labor market
Most US corporate executives say they believe AI will have a major impact on their organizations in the coming years, according to a survey by KPMG.
The majority of US corporate executives say they are “unprepared for immediate adoption of generative AI,” according to KPMG.
However, 65% of respondents said they believe “generative AI will have a major impact on their organization in the next three to five years.”
60% say they are “still a year or two away from implementing the technology.”
Executives say they see “major hurdles to adoption, such as determining clear business cases and installing the right technology, talent, and governance.”
The main concerns respondents mentioned when it comes to AI adoption include cybersecurity and data privacy.
39% of respondents said they “believe that generative AI could lead to decreased social interactions and human connections with coworkers that may have negative impacts on the workforce.”
32% of respondents “worried about the possibility of increased mental health issues within their workforce due to the stress of job loss and uncertainty about the future.”
Just 6% of respondents say their organization has a “dedicated team in place for evaluating AI-related risks and implementing mitigation strategies.”
“There’s a lot of interest among CFOs, but to go from that to developing and executing a plan takes time. Just like with any new technology, people want to prove it out [before adopting it]."
Read more via KPMG, CFO Dive
It's no secret that AI is currently being “hotly debated” by employers, workers, and even local and national governments. But, most HR leaders say they think artificial intelligence will have a positive impact on how they do their job, according to the Conference Board's CHRO Confidence Index for the second quarter of 2023.
65% of Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) say they “expect AI to have a positive impact on the HR function over the next two years," according to The Conference Board.
Read more via Conference Board
According to a newly published World Economic Forum report, “nearly a quarter of all jobs will change as a result of AI, digitization and other economic developments like the green energy transition and supply chain re-shoring.”
The report suggests AI will result in a “significant labor-market disruption,” but says the “net impact of most technologies will be positive over the next five years as big data analytics, management technologies and cybersecurity become the biggest drivers of employment growth.”
ChatGPT and other similar applications will have a “particularly pronounced impact by displacing and automating many roles that involve reasoning, communicating and coordinating.”
75% of companies surveyed said they “expect to adopt AI technologies over the next five years, which they predict will eliminate up to 26 million jobs in record-keeping and administrative positions.”
Read more via Fortune
IBM “expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years,” according to an interview with CEO Arvind Krishna published by Bloomberg News. Krishna said hiring “specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed,” and indicated that “30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.”
Read more via Yahoo Finance
Hollywood writers are on strike, but as labor negotiations continue, the unions representing writers and actors are looking to set limits on AI. Included in the list of objectives unions recently proposed was a reference to the union's aim to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.” According to experts, it is “not out of the realm of possibility" that writers could be replaced by “a bunch of AIs.” The union representing writers says it “wants to ensure that artificial intelligence does not receive a writer’s credit on a project.”
“Early on in the conversations with the guild, we talked about what I call the Nora Ephron problem, which is basically: What happens if you feed all of Nora Ephron’s scripts into a system and generate an AI that can create a Nora Ephron-sounding script?”
Read more via New York Times
Late last month, four federal agencies issued a joint statement, cautioning on the use of AI and how existing laws apply to the use of AI and automated systems. The statement was issued jointly by Department of Justice, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Trade Commission.
The statement highlighted “three potential sources of discrimination within automated systems: data and datasets, model opacity and access, and design and use.”
Regulators are focused on predictive AI, which employers use to predict outcomes and analyze data based on pattern analysis, and generative AI, of which ChatGPT is the well-known example.
The statement does not offer new regulations, but instead indicates a “commitment by the agencies to enforce existing laws with additional scrutiny on techniques and technologies that rely on AI,” according to experts.
“These automated systems are often advertised as providing insights and breakthroughs, increasing efficiencies and cost-savings, and modernizing existing practices. Although many of these tools offer the promise of advancement, their use also has the potential to perpetuate unlawful bias, automate unlawful discrimination, and produce other harmful outcomes.”
Read more via HR Dive, FTC
