Add ChatGPT to the list of things employees are worried about, reflecting the growth of an artificial intelligence-based chatbot creeping its way into the office, as if there weren’t already enough layoff worries in the IT business.
According to Challenger, Grey & Christmas, the IT sector has already shed 5% more employees this year than it did in all of 2022.
The rate of layoffs is on pace to surpass 2001, the worst year for tech layoffs owing to the dot-com implosion.
Workers are not only afraid of being laid off, but they are also afraid of being replaced entirely. According to a recent Goldman Sachs research, AI and automation will affect 300 million employment worldwide.
According to Sultan Saidov, co-founder and president of Beamery, a global human capital management software-as-a-service company with its own GPT, or generative pretrained transformer, called TalentGPT, ChatGPT and AI should not instill fear in employees because these tools will help people and businesses work more efficiently.
“It’s already being estimated that 300 million jobs are going to be impacted by AI and automation,” Saidov said. “The question is: Does that mean that those people will change jobs or lose their jobs? I think, in many cases, it’s going to be changed rather than lose.”
ChatGPT is one sort of GPT tool that employs learning models to create human-like replies, and according to Saidov, GPT technology may help employees do more than simply talk. Specific occupations, particularly in the technology sector, stand to be affected more than others.
Creatives and designers should adopt AI skills
Designers, video game producers, photographers, and people who generate digital pictures, according to Saidov, are among those whose professions will likely not be fully eliminated. He believes it will help these positions generate more and complete their tasks more quickly.
“If you look back to the industrial revolution, when you suddenly had automation in farming, did it mean fewer people were going to be doing certain jobs in farming?” Saidov said. “Definitely, because you’re not going to need as many people in that area, but it just means the same number of people are going to different jobs.”
Similar to previous patterns, creative occupations will be in high demand after the broad adoption of generative AI and other AI technology in the workplace.
“With video game creators, if the number of games made globally doesn’t change year over year, you’ll probably need fewer game designers,” Saidov said. “But if you can create more as a company, then this technology will just increase the number of games you’ll be able to get made.”
Software developers and engineers will be impacted
Many software developers and engineers are concerned about their job security as a result of the ChatGPT hype, prompting others to seek new talents and learn how to create generative AI to add to their portfolio.
“It’s unfair to say that GPT will completely eliminate jobs, like developers and engineers,” says Sameer Penakalapati, chief executive officer at Ceipal, an AI-driven talent acquisition platform.
However, although these positions will continue to exist, their duties and responsibilities will most likely be reduced by GPT and generative AI.
When it comes to the employment market, Penakalapati believes there is a significant difference to be made between GPT particularly and generative AI more generally. GPT is a mathematical or statistical model that learns patterns and produces results. However, he claims that other types of generative AI may go much farther, recreating multiple outcomes based on patterns and learnings and virtually mimicking a human brain.
Penakalapati cites software developers, engineers, and testers as examples of how GPT can create code in seconds, providing software users and consumers precisely what they need without the back and forth of communicating requests, modifications, and adjustments to the development team. GPT can accomplish the work of a programmer or tester in seconds, rather than the days or weeks it may take a person to complete, he claims.
According to Penakalapati, generative AI may have a broader influence on software engineers, notably devops (development and operations) engineers, from code development through deployment, maintenance, and upgrades in software development. Generative AI may imitate what an engineer would accomplish throughout the development cycle in this larger range of jobs.
While development and engineering jobs are swiftly adjusting to new technologies in the workplace, Penakalapati believes the tools will never completely replace people. More than likely, the number of developers and engineers required to construct a piece of software will drop.
“Whether it’s a piece of code you’re writing, whether you’re testing how users interact with your software, or whether you’re designing software and choosing certain colors from a color palette, you’ll always need somebody, a human, to help in the process,” Penakalapati said.
Knowledge workers could benefit from ChatGPT
While GPT and AI will have a greater influence on certain occupations than others, the adoption of these technologies will have an impact on every knowledge worker, defined as anybody who utilises or manages information in their profession by Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute.
“These technologies enable the ability to create first drafts very quickly, of all kinds of different things, whether it’s writing, generating computer code, creating images, video, and music,” Chui said. “You can imagine almost any knowledge worker being able to benefit from this technology and certainly the technology provides speed with these types of capabilities.”
According to a recent research conducted by OpenAI, the inventor of ChatGPT, around 80% of the US workforce might have at least 10% of their job activities impacted by the introduction of learning models in GPT tech, while roughly 19% of employees could see 50% of their duties impacted.
employees now, according to Chui, can’t remember a period when they didn’t have tools like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, so we can assume that employees in the future won’t be able to picture a world of work without AI and GPT technologies.
“Even technologies that greatly increased productivity, in the past, didn’t necessarily lead to having fewer people doing work,” Chui said. “Bottom line is the world will always need more software.”
