AI creates flux across industries as companies seek AI-fluent workers

File-storage service Dropbox said that it was cutting about 16 percent of its workforce, or about 500 people in lieu of getting AI to do the job.

Artificial Intelligence based tools seem to have caused a flux across industries, where on one hand, industries are witnessing layoffs and on the other hand the demand for employees fluent in the use of AI-based tools seems to be increasing.

Layoffs

Edtech company Chegg announced that it was laying off 4 percent of its staff, nearly 80 employees, in a regulatory filing on June 12. “To better position the company to execute against its AI strategy and to create long-term, sustainable value for its students and investors,” the release said.

Some tech firms such as IBM have also proceeded to pause the hiring procedure for certain roles which the company feels can be done by AI, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in an interview with Bloomberg in May.

File-storage service Dropbox also said that it was cutting about 16 percent of its workforce, or about 500 people in lieu of getting AI to do the job.

Data from Layoffs.fyi suggests that nearly 212,294 workers in the tech industry were laid off in the first half of 2023 alone, already surpassing the 164,709 recorded in 2022.

In fields such as telecom, England based British Telecom(BT) announced plans to lay-off 50,000 staffers by 2030, the company currently employs 1,30,000 staffers.

"Whenever you get new technologies you can get big changes," Jansen said.

Enhanced not obsolete

While the forecast on layoffs seems gloomy, it isn't all that sad. IBM's Krishna in a later interview said: "AI is going to create more jobs than it takes away".

Commenting on AI's ability to enhance work as opposed to obsolete it, Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, told CNN that he doesn’t see it playing out as machines replacing humans just yet. “AI, as far as I see it, doesn’t necessarily replace humans, but rather enhances the work of humans, I think that the kind of competition that we all should be thinking more about is that human specialists will be replaced by human specialists who can take advantage of AI tools.”

Tech giants such as Microsoft which laid off 10,000 employees earlier this year and Meta which laid off 11,000 people, have also spoken about investing in AI, which Microsoft later followed up with a “multibillion dollar” investment into OpenAI.

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Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

While layoffs are a harsh reality, the demand for workers with AI expertise presents a different picture. The time seems right to follow the 'Improvise, Adapt and Overcome' strategy.

“Improvise, adapt, overcome” is an unofficial slogan among the United States Army Marines made popular by a meme about Man vs Wild, TV Show host, Bear Grylls who would say the phrase while facing extremely adverse and physically challenging survival based tasks.

Start-up founder Roger Lee's 'Comprehensive.io', which examines job listings and compensation data across some 3,000 tech companies found that the average salary for a senior software engineer specialising in AI or machine learning (ML) is 12 percent higher than for those who don’t.

Lee dubbed the data point as the “the AI premium.” The average salary for a senior software engineer specialising in AI or ML has also increased by nearly 4 percent since the beginning of the year, whereas the average salary for senior software engineers on the whole has stayed flat.

Citing the case of Dropbox, Lee said the company offers a base salary listing of $276,300 to $373,800 for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer role which is an AI based role, by comparison the current average salary for a senior software engineer is at $171,895 in the same firm.

Wong told CNN that not only everyone needs to become 'AI specialists', but workers should also know how to use AI tools to become more efficient at whatever they’re doing. Thus those looking to thrive in the tech industry and beyond need to integrate AI into their skillset.