Executives Expect AI to Start Impacting Payrolls Within Five Years

Despite the fear mongering and hysteria, artificial intelligence hasn’t had a major impact on the workforce so far. But the landscape could look different by 2030.

A new poll of 2,000 executives, conducted by Adecco Group, a Swiss staffing firm, finds that most expect the technology to begin reducing the number of workers at thousands of companies within the next five years.

Just over 40% of the corporate leaders said they expect to have smaller workforces because of AI. The Adecco survey is one of the largest to look at AI and job displacement. It comes on the heels of a study by the World Economic Forum last year that found 25% of companies expect AI to bring job losses.

Of course, AI will also open up new job categories. And the hunt is on for people with AI skills. The Adecco survey, however, reveals some of the thinking among executives on how they’re going to find those sorts of workers.

Two-thirds of the executives surveyed said they expect to find AI-skilled talent externally. Just one third planned to develop the skills in their existing workforce, something that earned business leaders a rebuke from Adecco.

“Artificial Intelligence is emerging as a great disrupter in the world of work and the current path is unsustainable,” said Denis Machuel, CEO of the Adecco Group. “Companies must do more to reskill and redeploy teams to make the most of this technological leap and avoid unnecessary upheaval. Buying your way out of disruption should not be the only approach companies take.”

As far as AI job loss goes, it will certainly be useful for workers to have AI skills. Just 46% of the business leaders surveyed said they would redeploy workers whose jobs were lost to AI.

That could, ultimately, impact the C-suite as well. Some 57% of the leaders said they lack confidence in their own C-Suite’s ability to understand the risks and opportunities AI presents. Despite that, just 43% said they had formal training programs in place to improve people’s AI skills—and just half were providing guidance to staff on how to use AI at work.

“It is imperative that leaders not only urgently deploy AI upskilling, but also ensure it is implemented safely and responsibly by keeping people firmly at the center of this transition,” said Machuel. “AI should be a tool that supports people’s unique creative potential and enables more time for strategic thinking and problem solving.”

The study spoke with leaders in 18 industries — including energy, retail and the automotive sector — across nine countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and Germany.

The Adecco report might be a rough read, but another study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a bit more optimistic.

That report found AI job loss was less likely than some people predicted, since it would raise costs. While AI can do some jobs as well as (or even better) than people, it would cost a lot more for them to do so.

“‘Machines will steal our jobs’ is a sentiment frequently expressed during times of rapid technological change. Such anxiety has re-emerged with the creation of large language models,” the researchers wrote. “We find that only 23% of worker compensation ‘exposed’ to AI computer vision would be cost-effective for firms to automate because of the large upfront costs of AI systems. … At today’s costs, U.S. businesses would choose not to automate most vision tasks that have ‘AI Exposure’.”

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