41% of Employers Worldwide Say They'll Reduce Staff by 2030 Due to AI

The World Economic Forum released its bi-annual survey on what employers worldwide expect their businesses to look like in the future and much of the attention is on generative AI. And while a majority (77%) expect to help train their existing staff to work with AI, 41% say they expect to reduce the number of staff they employ as AI automates more tasks on the job.

The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, which covers more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerges from the survey is that employers believe many of their workers don’t have the skills needed to do their jobs as technology evolves.

While I share your skepticism about the viability or specificity of predictions, large think tanks do this sort of research all the time and provide at least some indication of where corporate weathervanes are pointing and trends in business management, be they fundamental or faddish.

This information was all laid out in the first 2 paragraphs. You could have critiqued their track record or methods rather than asserting such questions are meaningless. Why do you think it's so outlandish to survey ~1000 corporations, especially if that's your raison d'etre and you do it twice a year, every year?

41% of the business today won't exist by 2028.

You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.

> 41% of incendiary articles are purely written to gather clicks.

Agreed. This is just fear-baiting.

The year is 2029. The LinkedIn/Meta merger has resulted in a 100% rate of LLM recruiter agents and applicant agents sending emails with keywords set not to display via the “color” CSS consuming all Internet bandwidth.

The survivors envy the dead: what few resources remain are devoted to an arms race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on building the tallest and most efficient phallus to nowhere.

The only way for anyone, wherever they were born, to be part of the rocket class is to apply for an H1B visa. The lowest rate of accepted applications is in East Palo Alto.

Surfer Zuck hasn’t been seen in decades.

You don't need to interview all employers. It's called sampling.

I'm not sure what's sillier, banking on 3rd party bullshit generators to handle work product or ignoring the likelihood that executive tier depravity extends to these kinds of depths when the prospect of cutting labor costs is presented.

Totes bro.

No you've got your head in the sand. 41% of firms having plans to reduce staff with AI as part of the reason - that figure 100% tracks for me from conversations with upper management and C-suite at client sites.

Whether they will all get around to it or not I don't know but they enthusiasm they have for it is tremendous. I have no plans to cut staff within my own company but I also see very little headcount growth as being necessary in the next few years.

The mechanisms here are simple and plausible,

1) The task now is to train people on how to use generative AI to get more done - if you think this trend doesn't exist you really do have your head in the sand, this is happening, now, today, some roles and people do better with it than others but it is happening.

2) The upcoming task will be to let go of the least efficient performers, who have not increased their productivity by incorporating generative AI into their workflow. It will work, a part of the staff will complete X% more tasks, this will translate into X% of jobs being made redundant. When this large cost cutting opportunity exists and execs are basically chomping at the bit to make it happen, it will be super hard to achieve a positive hiring climate.

Now in eras past this might have been blunted by a number of factors, but all these factors are on their last legs:

A) Quality is a real issue when you double someone's workload and tell them to get it done using GenAI. However the global economy is increasingly consolidated under large firms that possess a lot of market power - they are too big and entrenched to be unseated, so they don't really have to deliver quality, they know this, they can just be shitty monopolies, cut costs, and feast anyway because the barriers to entry for competition are too high, consumer switching costs are too high etc. Quality is just going to go down and that is just going to be the new world. Big tech understands this opportunity better than anyone else, every single one of them is a criminal enterprise, and due to weak government enforcement every single one of them is still posting amazing profits

B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth. The nature of compounding numbers is that it's a slow burn until suddenly it isn't and if you look at a 10+ year horizon absolutely firms are thinking about this and they know there is no reversal to this trend, there is no gearing up for a future where everything suddenly doubles, long term the goal is to prepare for the shuttering of a lot of operations, adapting to markets being smaller, and this of course means managing a secular downward trend for your headcount, not upward.

It is a very precarious time we are entering, we either need to start busting trusts and making babies again, or the way of life that we knew is going to end. AI if anything is what is going to help us limp along into the twilight without a complete collapse of the value chain. Either way there is going to be a pretty limited appetite for new hiring in the foreseeable future due to a confluence of trends.

The tools will get better in time, with human assistance.

They will learn how to get better at providing results.

Nowadays, there's confusion, however, there is room for improvements.

Have they used GC.AI? Heard some buzz about it but kinda skeptical myself of these tools

Is that Relativity?

The company I work at went all in on ChatGPT subscriptions to help programmers. They tried to get us to use it for debugging and everything.

People went from using it nonstop to maybe using it once a week. All subscriptions were canceled and it's basically relegated to toy status now.

I would guess most people in leadership have no actual clue how they would replace the human in the seat with AI. They are riding the hype that the companies who provide the tools are putting out, but when it comes time to execute they don't have a plan. The steps between generated code to running in production is completely being ignored.

I'm hoping the work in fixing AI hype projects is just as lucrative as fixing overseas contracting projects has been.

I can guarantee that AI will be used as an excuse to lower wages.

Without looking at the actual report, it is a pretty meaningless statistic. Maybe it's more significant by job category, but if hiring can either go up or down, and you say about half think it's going down, you haven't suggested a non-trivial conclusion.

The more I work with Ai the more I feel like a programmer in 1950 dreaming about the www.

It will get here eventually, but barely within my lifetime and only if hardware keeps advancing the way its been for decades.

Also no one knows what the main events/news drivers will be in 5 years: climate, water, energy, war, peace? AI and economics, employment are way too little of concern at this point.

Everyone in the world knows that with current AI, you need probably a quarter of content writers to deliver the same output.

To pretend that there is a possibility that there would be no effects on hiring is foolish. Not saying it would increase unemployment, just shift the work.

YUP

They also predicted that the personal computer on everyone's desk, and every major software category, etc. would reduce employment. It just made more work

Maybe they'll hire some people back as bodyguards for the CEO?

I think it's called greed.

Imo the best case scenario for AI is that it allows almost anyone to become an executive. AKA a small business boom.

There is no group of people more fitting to be replaced by machines. Unfortunately, they have the means to ensure that they will be the last to be replaced.

Brace yourselves for technofeudalism...