Dive Brief:
- AI is set to drastically transform the global workforce, contributing to millions of job losses, but creating a net gain of 1.7 million jobs by 2030, Gartner projected Tuesday. The changes will unevenly impact workers in the tech sector as AI adoption shifts responsibilities and roles.
- More than 20% of workers will see their jobs evolve by 2030, Gartner said, changing what they do, how they do it and the scope of their responsibilities. Up to 1.8% of all workers globally will experience a job loss directly attributed to AI in the same timeframe, the report said.
- Though technologists have been experiencing an evolution of their roles from AI for some time, AI will create more job opportunities for the sector in the long run, John Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner told CIO Dive. “Each piece of the technology required to make AI work is going to require a new skill set and employee to deal with it,” he said. “The CIO will in fact need more employees to deal with AI than they have for just dealing with IT.”
Dive Insight:
AI has evolved how work gets done across industries — engineers are shifting from developing code to managing AI, restaurateurs are operationalizing workflows and financial services are enhancing lending decisions and forecasting.
The global workforce will see nearly 9 million job losses by 2030, Gartner predicts, but AI will create about 10.6 million new jobs in the same timeframe. The majority of people will see some changes to their core tasks and responsibilities, Lovelock said, but less than 2% will face job losses.
The global workforce likely won’t see a big shake-up in jobs until companies start wholly evolving how their departments run, he added.
“AI projects are going in to solve a certain business function and that business function has tasks that spread across many different jobs,” Lovelock said. “Each job is going to get affected by almost every AI project that comes in, but very few jobs will have all of their tasks affected by an AI project or a collection of AI projects.”
Upskilling will play a large role in this shift, Lovelock said, as business leaders need their existing employees to adjust to current and future skillsets. Skills gaps, not technical problems, often block enterprises from getting ROI from their AI projects.
By 2030, one-fifth of all workers will have to adapt how they do their jobs. When it comes to technologists, 70% will have high AI exposure, according to Gartner’s report.
But many workers currently struggle to meet the demands of working with AI. A Forrester report found only 16% of information workers had a high understanding of AI tools, compared with 43% who were in jeopardy of misunderstanding it.
Lovelock likened the evolution in skills to how employees had to adapt to desktop computers infiltrating the workplace.
“The skills that they need in order to be effective and productive in their job will change. Not everybody is going to become a prompt engineer — most people will be root users of the AI that is given to them by the organization,” he said. “But being able to use [AI] effectively is a similar kind of task to using email effectively back in 1989.”
CIOs will experience their own level of change management and disruption, Lovelock said. IT teams will likely feel the effects of AI in their roles sooner, but CIOs will then need to proliferate learnings throughout the organization, he said.
“What they do, how they do it and the pace that they do it [in] is going to affect what gets done in the way of change control, reskilling and employee happiness across the organization,” Lovelock said. “So, the changes that they’re going to feel themselves, they have to help manage within the greater organization.”
