AI Will Take Your Job!!!

The Wall Street Journal says AI is coming for our jobs! ?? ?? ??

Uh-huh. Let's unpack this.

The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily, including job cuts at Google, Duolingo, and UPS in recent weeks.

Google is hiring more people for AI development and cutting in other areas. AI isn't replacing those workers. Google is shifting its investments. That's true for most of the recent tech sector layoffs.

Duolingo isn't cutting jobs at all. They plan to reduce the use of contractors and use GenAI to create first drafts (which employees will review and edit.)?

Okay, so if you're a freelancer and all you do is create first drafts, you may want to learn something new. FWIW, much of the work I see from freelance writers is garbage.

UPS said that it would cut 12,000 jobs—primarily those of management staff and some contract workers—and that those positions weren’t likely to return even when the package-shipping business picks up again. The company has ramped up its use of machine learning in processes such as determining what to charge customers for shipments. As a result, the company’s pricing department has needed fewer people.

Doubtful that UPS had 12,000 people in the pricing department. UPS has delivered four consecutive quarters of declining revenue and earnings per share. Here's a little secret: companies with declining revenue and EPS fire people. AI has nothing to do with it unless they use AI to decide who stays and who goes.

As AI adoption grows, it is likely to reconfigure management hierarchies, the Oliver Wyman study projects.

Oliver Wyman is a strategy consulting firm. Consultancies like McKinsey, BCG, and Wyman cultivate GenAI FOMO because they sell the services panicked executives will need to implement a GenAI strategy. GenAI is the best thing for consultants since Y2K.

According to the analysis, the cascading effect could flatten layers of middle management, the staging ground for senior leadership roles.

I worked for a predecessor of Oliver Wyman from 1984 through 1991. They said exactly the same thing back then. Flattening layers of middle management is every CEO’s wet dream, but it never happens.

More than half of senior white-collar managers surveyed in the study said they thought their jobs could be automated by generative AI, compared with 43% of middle managers and 38% of first-line managers.

I can think of some senior white-collar managers that we can replace with a pet rock. But reality is very different from the perceptions captured in the survey. As a rule, it is easier to automate lower-level jobs than higher-level jobs, that necessarily require human interaction.

Prosus’s web designers, for instance, used to ask software developers to do the coding. Now they can do it themselves.

They got Shiny.

At Chemours, a DuPont spinoff, the company has trained close to 1,000 office and lab workers in AI applications over the past three years. As a result, finance professionals who used to prepare certain reports with a lot of copying and pasting between systems and spreadsheets now do it much faster because of their training with no-code analytic tools.

They bought Alteryx. Big Fucking Deal.