Artificial intelligence is responsible for far more layoffs than companies admit

United Parcel Service Inc. recently laid off the largest number of employees in its 116-year history. According to CEO Carol Toma, this was made possible by new technologies, including artificial intelligence. She cited just one example where machine learning allows salespeople to prepare proposals without needing guidance from pricing experts.

UPS is among a growing number of companies that are looking at AI from two different angles: on the one hand, they are showing investors how AI allows them to do more with less, while at the same time avoiding scaring people away from direct integration of technology and layoffs. A UPS public relations representative said that AI is not replacing employees and that management did not confirm an explicit link between artificial intelligence and layoffs during the results presentation to investors.

BlackRock Inc. last month is the same heralded a wave of layoffs, namely 600 jobs are said to be at stake. CEO Larry Fink and President Rob Kapito told employees that dramatic changes are occurring in the industry, and perhaps the biggest is how new technologies are affecting all industries.

Experts cannot come up with an exact estimate of how many jobs have been lost due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. According to the data Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. should have laid off companies in the USA since last May 4600 people to free up resources to hire people with AI experience or because technology has replaced tasks. However, Senior Vice President Andrew Challenger added that this estimate is “certainly an underestimate” and that the real number is much higher.

“In all likelihood, there are more jobs in the economy that AI displaces than it creates. Every time a company mentions anything related to this area, it appears in the media. So companies don't want to expose themselves,” says Challenger.

Last spring, International Business Machines Corp. was all over the headlines when their CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that plan to stop hiring, because, in his opinion, certain jobs are soon to be replaced by UI. An IBM public relations representative said the company has no plans to freeze hiring and plans to maintain headcount.

Johnny Taylor, CEO Society for Human Resource Management, stated that she thinks many of these “cuts” will be made quietly.”"IBM was the first to go public with that announcement, and it cost them a lot," Taylor said in an interview in December. "Then the others said, 'We're not going to announce it, we're just going to do it.' We're going to cut the number of employees.""

Many companies could do exactly that, by significantly slowing down hiring, he added.When we wake up in three years, we will see much leaner organizations. They will simply replace you without much announcement", says Taylor.

The biggest hit to tech jobs

Apart from IBM, only a handful of companies have explicitly confirmed the connection between the introduction of artificial intelligence and layoffs. freezing of employment.

In December last year, Swedish company Klarna Inc. announced just that, with tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT supposedly cutting the time it takes to complete certain tasks. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the Telegraph that they require fewer people to do the same amount of work."It is most appropriate for us at this time to say that we are not hiring at the moment and are waiting to see how things develop," he said. said Klarna's public relations representative.

In January, one of the most popular language learning apps, Duolingo Inc., decided not to renew the contracts of approximately 10 % contractors.We simply no longer need as many people to do the work that the contractors were doing. In part, this can be attributed to artificial intelligence", a Duolingo spokesperson told Bloomberg. He also pointed out that Duolingo is still hiring for various roles. The company also said that none of its full-time employees have been laid off and that this is not a direct replacement of employees with artificial intelligence, which many people regularly use for their work.

All these companies that we have highlighted so far are not the only ones that think alike, although most of them do not say it out loud. Three out of four Fortune 500 companies that participated in a Gallup survey last year claim that they see how artificial intelligence will begin to replace employees within three years.

“Let's stop pretending - jobs will disappear due to artificial intelligence", says Bob Tahooney, director of human resources management at insurance company Allstate Corp. He added that in his statement he was referring to the entire market and not specifically to their company. "Jobs will be lost as well as upgraded", he concluded.

For his department, Tahooney offered an example of how artificial intelligence will change the work of HR development teams. As he himself says, the previously three-week content creation process can now be done in an hour or two.

In the technology industry, some of the biggest CEOs have warned that artificial intelligence will eliminate certain jobs. Elon Musk has even predicted that at some point we will get so far that no jobs will be needed anymore.