The CEO of IBM considers the drastic reduction of administrative staff of the computer giant given the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies to execute these types of tasks.
In an interview with the Bloomberg agency on Monday, Arvind Krishna said that his company would put a pause on hiring these profiles, potentially reducing the workforce by 7,800 jobs over several years.
“These non-customer jobs are almost 26,000 workers,” Krishna explained. “I can easily see 30% of that being replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”
The leader foresees a pause in the selection of personnel for that department, which represents a fraction of the almost 260,000 employees of the US group.
“There is no general cessation of hiring,” an IBM spokesman said on Tuesday, contacted by AFP.
“IBM has a very thoughtful hiring policy, focused on positions that generate revenue. We are very selective when it comes to positions that don’t directly concern our clients or technology. We have thousands of positions to fill right now,” he added.
Like many technology companies, IBM launched a social plan in the winter. The group laid off 5,000 employees in total, according to Bloomberg, although it hired 7,000 people in the first quarter.
OpenAI, the pioneer of generative AI, demonstrated with its ChatGPT interface and other tools that these new technologies are capable of composing emails, creating websites, generating lines of code, and generally performing many repetitive tasks.
In March, a Goldman Sachs study claimed that some 300 million jobs could be replaced by AI computer automation.
