AI may not steal many jobs after all, just make workers more efficient

WASHINGTON

Imagine a customer-service center that speaks your language, no matter what it is.

Alorica, a company in Irvine, California, that runs customer-service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers who speak 200 different languages and 75 dialects.

Such is the power of AI. And, potentially, the threat: Perhaps companies won’t need as many employees — and will slash some jobs — if chatbots can handle the workload instead.

But the thing is, Alorica isn’t cutting jobs. It’s still hiring aggressively.

The experience at Alorica suggests that AI may not prove to be the job killer that many people fear.

Instead, the technology might turn out to be more like breakthroughs of the past — the steam engine, electricity, the internet: That is, eliminate some jobs while creating others.

At its core, artificial intelligence empowers machines to perform tasks previously thought to require human intelligence.

AI burst into public consciousness in 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT .

The arrival of generative AI has raised worries that chatbots will replace freelance writers, editors, coders, telemarketers, customer-service reps, paralegals and many more.

Yet the widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn’t becoming reality in any widespread way. 

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found “little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.’’

They cited a study this year led by David Autor, a leading MIT economist: It concluded that 60 percent of the jobs Americans held in 2018 didn’t even exist in 1940, having been created by technologies that emerged only later.

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI.

At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to some categories of jobs isn't unfounded.

Researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London’s Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists tumbled within eight months of the arrival of ChatGPT.

But being exposed to AI doesn’t necessarily mean losing your job to it. AI can also do the drudge work, freeing up people to do more creative tasks.

IKEA, for example, introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries. Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer-service workers to handle such tasks as advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.