International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) may soon reportedly start replacing several jobs with artificial intelligence (AI). As per a report, IBM’s chief executive officer (CEO) Arvind Krishna has said that IBM may pause hiring for roles that it thinks could be replaced with AI in the coming years.
According to a Bloomberg report, IBM CEO has said that hiring in back-office functions like human resources (HR) may either be suspended or slowed. It quotes the CEO as saying, “I could easily see 30 per cent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”
Further, a company spokesperson reportedly added that this would mean roughly 7,800 jobs being lost. It added, “Part of any reduction would include not replacing roles vacated by attrition.”
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The report adds that IBM currently roughly employs about 2,60,000 workers and continues its hiring spree for software development and customer-facing roles. Before any of this, IBM also announced layoffs due to which nearly 5,000 workers may be impacted.
However, the report reads, “Still, Krishna said IBM has added to its workforce overall, bringing on about 7,000 people in the first quarter.”
The question of AI replacing jobs has been doing rounds in this age of the internet. With the growing popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard and many such AI tools, experts believe that we are slowly headed to a time where several job roles may be eliminated as AI would make work relatively convenient.
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