International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is facing a turning point with Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Arvind Krishna deciding to replace up to 7,800 jobs with AI in the next five years. In an interview with a media outlet, Krishna expressed his intention to pause hiring for jobs that could be done with an artificial intelligence in the future. The news outlet Bloomberg reported that the company will be freezing their hiring for these positions with a potential cost-saving mechanism.
This move to replace roles with AI reads as a noteworthy journey of technological renovation and the shift to robotics technology. Currently, IBMs workforce is 260,000 huge, hence the considerable proportion of 7,800 in this figure signifies an immense transformation by the tech firm. Notably, hiring will still be done in software development and customer-facing roles, but the decision to substitute certain HR accessibilities such as providing employment verifications and cross-department agility is likely to be fully automated.
According to the job advice platform Resumebuilder, some U.S. companies have already started embracing Open-AI’s ChatGPT instead of human workers for a multitude of tasks and operations. IBM is undergoing a divestment process to bring the annual cash flow upto $10 billion but at the same time, laid-off nearly 3,900 employees due to the prolonged slump.
This year, the demand for artificial intelligence talent in India is reported to have grown eleven percentage in the past six months. However, AI is yet to meet the standard set by humans and often makes falls short due to a number of reasons. To better this, IBM has recently taken Microsoft and OpenAI to help build an AI coding assistant for its engineers.
Krishna has indicated that this AI integration would likely be a long-term trend and companies are expected to approach it cautiously before deciding whether to let go of human labour entirely. IBM and the rest of the tech giants of the world will be at the forefront of innovation in the coming years, with AI and robots being a key part of the equation.
