IBM will stop hiring employees who can be replaced by artificial intelligence

International Business Machines (IBM), a software and IT services corporation, will suspend the hiring of employees whose work can be performed by artificial intelligence (AI) in the next five years. About it informed CEO Arvind Krishna in an interview with Bloomberg.

First of all, the changes will affect the back office, where the hiring of new personnel will either be suspended or slowed down. At the same time, the initiative will not affect employees who interact with customers.

According to Krishna, IBM employs about 26,000 people whose duties do not include communicating with customers. “I could easily see how 30% of these employees will be replaced by artificial intelligence <...> within five years,” he said. According to Bloomberg estimates, the cuts could affect about 7,800 employees. In total, the company employs 260,000 people.

The IBM CEO also expects tasks such as job confirmation emails and reshuffle announcements to be automated. At the same time, he added, some HR functions, including employee appraisals and employee performance, probably won’t be able to be replaced by AI over the next decade.

March 29 Future of Life Institute published a letter calling for an “immediate suspension” of AI systems training. The petition was signed by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, philanthropist Andrew Yang and about a thousand other researchers. The letter emphasizes that AI should be developed “only when we are confident that its effects will be positive and the risks manageable.”

One of the risks of technology development, researchers previously called a surge in unemployment. In March of this year, Goldman Sachs published study stating that, if realized, generative AI could automate 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. In particular, in the US and Europe, technology can replace two-thirds of jobs, and then extrapolated the data to the whole world.