Second Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, artificial intelligence (AI) will take the place of several employees in the coming years. The executive, in a controversial statement reported by Bloomberg, made it known that there will be no more hiring for back-office functions, as well as for human resources.
This digitization process will involve approx 26,000 IBM employees, of which 30% will be replaced by artificial intelligence and automation in a five-year time frame. It’s about 7800 jobs that will disappear. However, it must be said that a part of these will be made up of employees who will retire and who will not be replaced. Moreover, Krishna was one of the managers of the acquisition of Red Hatthe largest acquisition in company history, which created the hybrid cloud market.
Will IBM favor AI at the expense of employees?
In recent months, several artificial intelligence services have been born with extraordinary capabilities. Just think of ChatGPT, recently reactivated in Italy, capable of creating texts, lines of code and even elaborate ones. Krishna said the simplest tasks, like writing appraisal letters or moving employees between departments, will be completely automated.
Other HR-related tasks, such as analyzing the composition and productivity of the workforce, could instead remain in human hands (at least for the next decade). IBM’s goal is to automate routine tasks as much as possiblethereby reducing labor costs. The US company had already announced in early 2021 the intention to cut about 3900 employees.
Meanwhile, today they are discussing the resignation of Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google after 10 years. Hinton, dubbed the Godfather of AI, said he stepped down so he could speak freely about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Dangers that, according to Hinton, could lead to the extinction of the human race.