AI Will Replace Nearly Five Million American Jobs: Challenger Gray Report

An executive coaching firm has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could replace millions of jobs, rather than just automate specific tasks, and is currently developing at a pace that could be threatening. The Chicago-based Challenger Gray firm asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT what jobs it could replace before converting the answers into data obtained from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, resulting in a total of 4.8 million jobs at threat from the ongoing AI expansion. The majority of affected roles are repetitive and predictable, and while some may decline within the next decade, others are predicted to increase employment figures within their respective sectors.

Andrew Challenger, senior VP of the firm has called for AI to be viewed as a tool to support workers rather than as a replacement for their roles, stating that “predictive language models can be used to automate tasks, giving workers more time to focus on those involving higher thinking”.

The advent of the report comes amid a tightening of the US jobs market just prior to the March ADP Employment Report which showed a decrease in the number of new jobs added as compared to February’s figures. Similarly, compensation has also begun to decline.

AI-Expendable Jobs

The report noted that customer service representatives, technical writers, data entry clerks, copywriters, and translators and interpreters were some of the jobs most threatened by the expansion of AI. ChatGPT had mentioned the potential for automated responses substituting for human interaction in customer service representative roles , technical documentation generation negating the need for technical writing jobs, and data entry jobs being automated. Roles such as copywriters were expected to go down in the next 10 years.

A Goldman Sachs report from 2017 concurred with the Challenger Gray report, stating that AI could lead to the elimination of 300 million full-time jobs while also initiating new job openings.

AI-Generated Jobs

The expansion of AI is also expected to result in job growth within related areas, such as machine learning and data science. Many AI developments depend on the advancement in areas such as maths and statistics, computer science, robotics, and automation. Management students pursuing technical AI-related fields may also see an increase in relevant job opportunities. Linguistics is another area where growth may occur, as human linguists will be required to program AI models.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and leading AI researcher, has noted that the impact of the continued AI developments may be catastrophic.