AI May Not Steal Many Jobs After All. It May Just Make Workers More Efficient

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Excerpt from AP

The widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn’t becoming reality in any widespread way – not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found “little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.’’ The advisers noted that history shows technology typically makes companies more productive, speeding economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways.

They cited a study this year led by David Autor, a leading MIT economist: It concluded that 60% of the jobs Americans held in 2018 didn’t even exist in 1940, having been created by technologies that emerged only later.

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI.

“I don’t think we’ve started seeing companies saying they’ve saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,’’ said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm’s sales team. “That may come in the future. But it hasn’t played out yet.’’

A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University concluded that telemarketers and teachers of English and foreign languages held the jobs most exposed to ChatGPT-like language models. But being exposed to AI doesn’t necessarily mean losing your job to it. AI can also do the drudge work, freeing up people to do more creative tasks.

The Swedish furniture retailer IKEA, for example, introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries. Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer-service workers to handle such tasks as advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.

Chatbots can also be deployed to make workers more efficient, complementing their work rather than eliminating it. A study by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT tracked 5,200 customer-support agents at a Fortune 500 company who used a generative AI-based assistant. The AI tool provided valuable suggestions for handling customers. It also supplied links to relevant internal documents.

Those who used the chatbot, the study found, proved 14% more productive than colleagues who didn’t. They handled more calls and completed them faster. The biggest productivity gains — 34% — came from the least-experienced, least-skilled workers.

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