Impact of AI on Jobs: 1.8 Million to be Eliminated, 2.3 Million to be Created

We are still in dilemma with Artificial Intelligence (AI) with myths like it can replace humans. However, we know it’s a machine with intelligence that can simulate human cognitive function.

The future of AI would be bringing automation, reducing human efforts and enhancing productivity, intelligent decision making, etc. We can also expect AI (What to expect) to bring empowerment to smart cities, driverless cars, and many other activities.

The education industry has been utilising AI to automate the education process, (How online education is leveraging AI) helping both students and teachers in gaining the most out the immense opportunity, all while democratizing education amongst all.

Not only education and healthcare, but AI has also changed the way hiring was happening. Future Recruitment Process is going to be different, HR & recruiters can harness the full potential of A.I. along with robotics. AI will help to evaluate the education level and cognitive ability of the candidates and accordingly helping the recruiters make quick and better decisions.

But Will AI Put HR Managers Out of Work! Actually not. It can reduce the hiring efforts for HRs to save their time and help them to make a better decision while appointing a new candidate on the basis of their video interview and profile, experience, etc.

But we can not completely deny the fact that AI will impact on jobs. According to Arup Roy, Research Vice President, Gartner - One of the greatest fears that workers in industrial setups have is that technologies like AI will be focused solely on automation and eliminate the role of humans in the workplace.

Arup Roy Research Vice President Gartner

While this may be true in some instances, it may not even be the best use of AI. A study by Gartner states that 2020 will play a pivotal role in AI-relation employment dynamics. Gartner predicts that 1.8 million jobs will be eliminated, but 2.3 million jobs will be created (source: “Forecast: The Business Value of Artificial Intelligence, Worldwide, 2017-2025” G00348137).

When AI comes together at the right point, companies can do more, with better quality, and faster than with complete automation. The trick is to apply each technology to the right use case. Here are a couple of examples:

Decision Support Augmentation — We believe that augmentation will be the biggest AI growth area. In simple terms, AI augmentation combines AI and human operations in a complementary way.

Augmentation benefits include:

• Coaching and advising humans.

• Reducing bias.

• Simplifying interactions and making them consistent.

Stitch Fix is a great example of AI augmentation. Stitch Fix is a personalized shopping company that uses AI for human augmentation. Stitch Fix uses AI to narrow down merchandise selection but leaves the final choice of items and any “personal touches” to human designers.

The company created jobs not only for 65 data scientists but thousands of designers. By 2030, decision support/augmentation will surpass all other types of AI initiatives to account for 44% of the global AI-derived business value (same source as above).

Decision Automation — Decision automation systems use AI to automate tasks or optimize business processes. They are particularly helpful in tasks like translating voice to text and vice versa, processing handwritten forms or images, and classifying other rich data content not readily accessible to conventional systems.

Statistical techniques can automate routing, recommend next steps or create instances of workflows that automatically improve over time, based on AI data (same source as above).

Automation benefits include:

• Automation is faster and more accurate than humans.

• Automation learns continuously from new data.

• Automation can improve safety and accessibility.

For now, decision automation accounted for just 2% of the global AI-derived business value in 2017 but will grow to 19% by 2030.