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IBM, or International Business Machines Corp., is putting its job hiring on pause as it plans to replace about 7,800 jobs with Artificial Intelligence (AI). This information was reportedly revealed by the company’s own chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, on Monday, May 1.
As per Reuters, IBM’s job recruitment, especially for back-office positions such as human resources, is set to be halted or slowed. The CEO added that about 30% of the non-client-facing jobs in the company could be replaced by AI in five years.
Krishna’s statements come at a time when chatbots are going viral, and their popularity is growing. Moreover, a number of tech companies have also started creating their own AI robots and using them for various functions. For instance, Microsoft Corp. made its own chatbot and integrated it into its Bing search engine platform.
IBM CEO said most of the job roles that could be eliminated from the company are those which they think could be replaced with AI. He noted that IBM has around 26,000 employees who hold back office roles and admitted the company could see them being replaced by automation in a few years.
Bloomberg noted that as artificial intelligence tools are getting better and slowly proving their ability to do various tasks in the office, including writing texts and automating customer service, industry observers have started to express their concerns. They think there is a big possibility for robots to replace humans, and this could lead to serious disruptions in the labor market.
In any case, while most of the back office jobs could potentially be eliminated, IBM continues to hire employees for software development and roles that directly deal with customers. Currently, the company employs about 260,000, but this could be reduced in a few years with the fast development of automation tools worldwide.
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