• IBM says it is planning to stop hiring people for 30 percent of its non-customer-facing job positions and replace them with AI.
• Human resources is one department that is earmarked to receive a lot of cuts.
• This marks the largest shift to an AI workforce a company has announced yet.

The chief executive of IBM, one of the largest technology corporations in the world, said that the company plans to stop hiring for positions that could be filled by artificial intelligence instead, stoking the fire of the long-beaten argument of “will robots eventually take the jobs of humans.”

CEO Arvind Krishna says that hiring for jobs that serve “back-office functions,” like human resources (HR), for example, will be slowed or entirely suspended within the next five years.

This makes IBM among the very first big tech companies to publicly admit such a turn towards AI.

“I could easily see 30% of [non-customer-facing positions] getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” said Krishna in an interview, quoted by Bloomberg.

IBM currently manages around 26 000 jobs that don’t interact with customers. If Krishna’s estimates are correct, around 7 800 of those jobs will be filled by machines or software within the next five years.

An IBM spokesperson told Bloomberg that these positions would not be among those vacated by attrition, which includes letting go of workers or cutting jobs for external reasons, such as those causing the current industry-wide layoffs.

Whether this is simply a smoothing over of the news or if IBM will adhere to this will wait to be seen. Either way the move entails huge implications for the future of Big Tech, and any other company that can afford to replace people with software.

We are already seeing companies admit to saving significant amounts of time on tasks using tools like ChatGPT to aid employees, but to replace human workers entirely with these tools has yet to be put through the litmus test.

Tools like ChatGPT are only growing more powerful and more dynamic in the tasks they can perform. Once-thought-improbable functions, like an AI writing code, or having a full conversation with you are now quite mundane.

For IBM, it will be the simplest and most-repeated tasks that will be replaced first. Krishna gives the example of providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments as functions that will eventually become fully automated.

More complex HR tasks, he said, like evaluating workforce composition and productivity won’t be replaced over the next decade, probably.

The outlook is indeed quite dystopian. Imagine you are one of the company’s 260 000 employees, and suddenly one day the IBM AI chatbot sends you a Slack message telling you that you have been demoted. What if in the near future companies have AI replace tasks that are uncomfortable, like dismissing workers?

While IBM says that it will keep 70 percent of these roles in the hands of actual people, and that it has hired 7 000 new employees in the first quarter of the year, who’s to say that the company won’t continue to axe positions, especially if it proves profitable in the long run.

Something that seems likely, since the company’s chief financial officer James Kavanaugh said that new productivity and efficiency steps, including an earlier round of job cuts (around 3 900 positions), are set to create $2 billion a year in savings by 2024.

[Image – Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash]