IBM plans to replace 7,800 jobs with AI and pause hiring

International Business Machines Corp (IBM) said today that thousands of jobs within the company are going to be replaced by AI and automation in the next few years. In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, CEO Arvind Krishna told the publication that IBM  is planning to suspend hiring for approximately 7,800 jobs that will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years.

The anticipated job replacements will affect around 26,000 workers in back-office functions, such as human resources, Krishna said, adding that he foresees up to 30% of these roles being taken over by AI and automation. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the tech giant told Bloomberg.

“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.” This translates to roughly 7,800 jobs lost. Krishna added that part of any reduction would include not replacing roles vacated by attrition.

The news comes just a month after a report that found ChatGPT AI can do some jobs better than humans. The report added that the wildly popular OpenAI’s ChatGPT is expected to replace 4.8 million U.S. jobs. The jobs include customer service representatives, translators and interpreters, technical writers; copywriters; and data entry clerks.

Krishna’s remark coincides with the growing fascination with AI, especially following the introduction of the viral chatbot ChatGPT, which was backed by Microsoft Corp and developed by OpenAI in November of last year. Meanwhile, Krishna added the reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition.

The popularity of AI-focused cryptocurrencies has surged since the beginning of the year, in part due to the success of ChatGPT, the mainstream chatbot. However, some doubt the long-term sustainability of these tokens, believing that recent gains are a short-term price increase driven by opportunistic traders taking advantage of the hype.

In just two months after its launch, ChatGPT went from an obscure AI tool to reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The sudden success of ChatGPT has put more pressure on other tech companies including Google, Baidu, and Alibaba, to launch their own ChatGPT-like tools.

Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) is a type of language model developed by OpenAI. It is a neural network-based model that is trained to generate human-like text by predicting the next word in a sequence based on the words that come before it. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools use a large language model (LLM) technique to generate text in a chat-like or conversational style.

Jobs that will be replaced by AI

Below is a chart of jobs that will be replaced by AI. Here is how Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius explains it, “using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation” as up to “two-thirds of occupations could be partially automated by AI.”

Credit: Goldman Sachs