At their recent CEO Connections event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went as far as saying that this new wave of AI technology is on par with the birth of personal computers and the emergence of the internet, in terms of its potential global impact.
While writers, actors and other artists have been fighting to protect their livelihoods from AI’s looming threat, Elon Musk imagines what I can only describe as a nightmarish vision of the future where no one works at all (although admittedly, as a recruiter, I’m predictably biased about the nightmarish part).
Our recent Reed/Bloomberg job market report sheds some light on this issue. While AI is currently a hot topic across politics and business, jobs in the sector have plummeted, suggesting that organisations have lost interest in hiring for new AI roles.
That’s not to say that companies are ignoring AI altogether. From finance to e-commerce, businesses have been integrating this technology into existing roles, allowing them to offer new and improved products and services to their customers. Here at Reed, we’re using AI to help remedy a common problem for recruiters and managers – choosing appropriate interview questions for specific roles. With our interview question generator, a task that once took hours can now be completed with the click of a button.
Does this mean recruiters and their counterparts in other sectors will soon be out of a job? Not necessarily. Although AI will most likely cause some jobs to disappear, it will also liberate people from bureaucracy, eliminate mundane tasks, and allow workers to focus on the parts of their jobs only humans can do well.
So, while it’s almost certain that AI will transform the way we work and recruit (it already has), I’m of the belief that, for as long as there are people to help, problems to solve and personal connections to be made, there will still be jobs.
And, hopefully, there will still be recruiters.
