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IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said he was considering a drastic reduction in his administrative staff, given the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies to carry out tasks in this area.
In an interview granted Monday (1) to the Bloomberg agency, Krishna said that his company would suspend the hiring of these profiles and potentially reduce the number of employees.
“These non-customer contact positions employ almost 26,000 people. I can easily see 30% of this will be replaced by AI and automation in five years”predicted the leader of the American group, which has nearly 260,000 employees.
“There is no general halt to hiring,” an IBM spokesperson told AFP.
“The company has a very conservative recruiting policy, focusing on revenue-generating roles. We are very selective when it comes to roles that are not directly related to our customers or technology. We currently have thousands of positions to fill,” he said.
Like many technology companies, IBM has been downsizing its workforce. The group laid off 5,000 employees, according to Bloomberg, while it hired 7,000 in the first quarter.
OpenAI, a pioneer in generative AI, showed, with its ChatGPT interface and other tools, that these new technologies were capable of composing emails, creating websites, generating lines of code and performing many repetitive tasks.
A Goldman Sachs study indicated in March that around 300 million jobs could be replaced by AI automation.
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