Advanced AI systems more likely to replace white collar clerical work, says IBM’s Arvind Krishna

Arvind Krishna, CEO of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) | (Reuters file image)

Work that is repetitive in nature and can be automated will start to be done by AI systems, according to IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna. Speaking to Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the IBM CEO said that such work that can be done by AI systems is not a threat, and that he believes that AI systems are more likely to replace white collar clerical workers.

“I think these advanced AI systems will more likely replace white collar clerical workers, than the physical world where people tend to go. It's not going to replace farmers and truck drivers in the near term. Those are much further out, if at all," he quipped.

Krishna was commenting on the advances in AI in the context of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and said that advances in AI have been “substantial” over the last many years.

“What is going on in this phase is what are called large language models, and it is not unique to ChatGPT. But certainly, ChatGPT is a great example of that. I think Google and Facebook do a lot of work on it. IBM does a lot of work on it, as does open AI. So when I look at it, this is a trend that is deepfounded across,” he said.

He said that IBM has been using the underlying technology for two years in the work they do, but clarified they are not interested in doing chatbots or consumer technology.

“Rather than ChatGPT, I'm going to the underlying technology and I will tell you that absolutely, that's going to become the prevalent and the leading form for many things around natural language processing,” he added.

He gave the example of it making the lives of journalists easier but clarified that it can’t capture the nuance, body language, represent both points of view, etc. “Those are things that are going to be much harder for AI stems to do,” he said.