Microsoft's UK boss says the jobs market is “changing before our eyes” but not necessarily to the detriment of workers who are wary of AI.
In the latest flaring up of the heated debate over whether AI will create or destroy jobs, Claire Barclay is taking a bullish stance — and she has the data to prove it.
Microsoft's UK CEO, Barclay, said the company was seeing more job adverts on its subsidiary LinkedIn than before the pandemic and, more importantly, before the AI boom.
Speaking at Evident's AI Symposium, Barclay said this was a mix of employees wanting to change roles and employers trying to find the right skills for a new era of AI-powered jobs.
Will it create jobs or destroy jobs?
“There are a lot of people who are saying, 'I want to change jobs,' but at the same time, there are a lot of employers whose biggest concern is, 'We can't find enough talent,'” Barclay said.
The Microsoft executive, who has been in the role since October 2020, said in his 30 years working in tech, he has never seen the kind of progress seen last year, as money pours into AI startups and tech giants rush to develop large-scale language models and other exciting software.
Concerns are growing about how this automation trend will affect the labor market, and pessimists can cite several examples to show why.
Goldman Sachs predicts that AI could automate 300 million jobs worldwide by 2030. In an even more apocalyptic prediction, venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee recently doubled down on his 2017 prediction that AI would replace 50% of jobs by 2027.
“In 2017, 2018 and 2019, I was criticized for being too aggressive, and I was a bit nervous at the time,” the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures said at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Hong Kong in March.
“But when third-generation AI comes along, I think everyone will jump on board and believe that's the right pace.”
While analysts stress that the transition won't happen overnight, there are already examples of companies using AI to overhaul their workforce requirements.
Last year, Swedish pay-later pioneer Klarna announced a hiring freeze due to the impact of AI on its operations. In a February update, the group said chatbots were doing the work of 700 customer service representatives.
But Barclay still sees AI as a task assistant. Speaking at the Evident event alongside London Stock Exchange Group CEO David Schwimmer, the pair detailed how AI is doing this, including acting as a briefing tool for meetings and an email organizer.
“Everyone in the workplace has things that make their job a little easier, that help them out, that allow them to focus on the things that are a little more fun,” Barkley said.
Berkeley said Microsoft's co-pilots are like hiring “really good MBAs” to work for them, and encouraging them is like training a younger recruit.
“If you have an MBA holder, you can't just give them a simple explanation. [of a task]”We're actually going to give it a pretty broad range of tasks,” she said, adding that Microsoft is working further to share what types of prompts would be more effective for training the AI.
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