CEOs start saying the quiet part out loud: AI will wipe out jobs
'Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.," Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. 'AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind."
At JPMorgan Chase, Marianne Lake, CEO of the bank's massive consumer and community business, told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools.
The comments echo recent job warnings from executives at Amazon, Anthropic and other companies.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a note to employees in June that he expected the company's overall corporate workforce to be smaller in the coming years because of the 'once-in-a-lifetime" AI technology.
'We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Jassy said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years, resulting in U.S. unemployment of 10% to 20%, according to an interview with Axios. He urged company executives and government officials to stop 'sugarcoating" the situation.
The Ford CEO's comments are among the most pointed to date from a large-company U.S. executive outside of Silicon Valley. His remarks reflect an emerging shift in how many executives explain the potential human cost from the technology. Until now, few corporate leaders have wanted to publicly acknowledge the extent to which white-collar jobs could vanish.
In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses, noting that innovation historically creates a range of new roles.
In private, though, CEOs have spent months whispering about how their businesses could likely be run with a fraction of the current staff. Technologies including automation software, AI and robots are being rolled out to make operations as lean and efficient as possible.
Professionals will need to accept the reality that few roles will be unchanged by AI, Micha Kaufman, CEO of the freelance marketplace Fiverr, wrote in a memo to his staff this spring.
'This is a wake-up call," he wrote. 'It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person—AI is coming for you."
Shopify Chief Executive Tobi Lütke recently told workers that the company wouldn't make any new hires unless managers could prove artificial intelligence isn't capable of doing the job.
Some corporate leaders are drawing up plans to consolidate roles further, blurring the jobs of a product manager and software engineer into one position at technology companies, for example. Other companies, such as Covid-vaccine maker Moderna, have asked staffers to launch new products or projects without adding head count.
'I think it's going to destroy way more jobs than the average person thinks," James Reinhart, CEO of the online resale site ThredUp, said at an investor conference in June.
Corporate advisers say executives' views on AI are changing almost weekly as leaders gain a better sense of what the technology can do—and as they watch their peers more aggressively change hiring plans or flatten corporate structures.
Some tech executives think the fears are overblown. Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI, told the New York Times's 'Hard Fork" podcast last week that he doesn't believe the impact to entry-level workers will be as swift and sweeping as some predict. 'We have yet to see any evidence that people are kind of wholesale replacing entry-level jobs," Lightcap said.
He acknowledged, though, that there will be job displacement, and said any new technology can lead to shifts in the labor market.
International Business Machines Chief Executive Arvind Krishna has said the company used AI to replace the work of a couple hundred people in human resources. But, he added, the company hired more programmers and salespeople.
Pascal Desroches, chief financial officer at AT&T, said in an interview last month that much remains unclear about how work will be reshaped by AI and that past technological revolutions have shown that new jobs often emerge.
'It's hard to say unequivocally, 'Oh, we're going to have less employees who are going to be more productive," he said. 'We just don't know.'"
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com and Haley Zimmerman at haley.zimmerman@wsj.com
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