IBM plans to replace 30% jobs with AI: reports

Arvind Krishna, CEO of the multinational technology firm IBM, recently stated that he plans to downsize the company's workforce by almost a third because he believes most jobs can be done by modern AI. 

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, the IBM (The International Business Machines Corporation) CEO said that the company plans on pausing hiring new employees, as well as reducing the wage of 7,800 jobs over several years. 

"These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers," Krishna said. "I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period." 

Back office employees are only a fraction of IBM's roughly 260,000 workers, and the company has continued to hire in certain roles, even after recently letting go about 5,000 workers in other areas, the Bloomberg report said.

In a recent statement to AFP, an IBM spokesman cautioned that "there is no blanket hiring 'pause' in place" at the company, based in Armonk, New York. "We're being very selective when filling jobs that don't directly touch our clients or technology," the IBM spokesman added.

The development of generative AI, as demonstrated by viral applications like ChatGPT, is making it possible to more easily execute less complex work such as certain human resource tasks, data management and other repetitive operations.

A study by Goldman Sachs in March said that as many as 300 million jobs could be lost to AI-powered automation, and one-fourth of current work tasks in the United States and Europe could be automated.

But while the release of ChatGPT took the world by storm late last year, the technology, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, is prone to mistakes and has led companies to only entrust it with simple tasks for now.