Lessons from the frontiers of AI adoption

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is becoming ever more common for bosses to talk up their artificial-intelligence efforts while wielding the axe. Last month Enrique Lores, chief executive of hP, said that the computer manufacturer would cut around 5,000 jobs within three years as it embeds “AI in everything we do".

The same day Marguerite Bérard, boss of ABN Amro, a Dutch bank, unveiled sweeping lay-offs of her own, declaring that her company was “embracing AI to improve client services and reduce costs". According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment firm, AI was cited as a cause in a fifth of the lay-offs announced by American companies in October. Much of this is posturing.

A company looks better if it attributes staff cuts to its technological prowess rather than pandemic-era over-hiring. So far, the evidence that AI is changing the labour market in a big way remains weak. Yet that could change once companies adopt the technology more widely.

Over the past few years plenty of researchers have sought to identify which jobs are most at risk by speculating about the types of tasks ChatGPT-like AI will be able to perform best, and determining where those tasks are most prevalent. A different approach is to look at the jobs where adoption of AI is already gaining pace and consider what links them. Two stand out.

First is computer programming. Some two-thirds of coders say that they use an AI tool at least once a week, according to data from Stack Overflow, an online forum. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, one coding tool, has 26m users worldwide.