Right To Be Nervous About AI?

In February, Fortune and Bloomberg reported that there had been more than 4,000 job losses in the US since May 2023 that were driven by AI uptake. The team behind the report, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, added that this was “certainly undercounting.” Among the company’s listed in the report was UPS, which let staff go as AI automated some processes.

However, there has also been a trend among companies to replace staff not with AI but with AI-savvy humans. Nvidia’s billionaire CEO Jensen Huang said at the company’s October AI Summit, roles like his are safe, but AI can do 20% to 50% of some people’s job; and it will be “the person who uses AI to automate that 20% [who] is going to take your job.”

Employees know they need to gem up. In May, the Financial Times reported on a survey carried out by education consultants CarringtonCrisp. It found that nearly half of respondents in a survey of 10,000 learners across 40 countries, were planning on learning about AI in the next five years.