Latest news with #Munyikwa
CNBC
26-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
AI is radically changing entry-level jobs, but not eliminating them
The ongoing rise of artificial intelligence is having a significant impact on many types of jobs, particularly entry-level positions and especially on roles that involve lots of automation. And while AI might not be eliminating a large percentage of early career jobs, as recent headlines have proclaimed, it certainly is changing them in a big way. "AI is reshaping entry-level roles by automating routine, manual tasks," said Fawad Bajwa, global AI, data, and analytics practice leader at executive search and leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates. "Instead of drafting emails, cleaning basic data, or coordinating meeting schedules, early-career professionals have begun curating AI-enabled outputs and applying judgment." For example, people working in entry-level marketing jobs are using generative AI to create first drafts of promotional or campaign documents, and early career data analysts are relying on AI to prepare datasets, Bajwa said. "AI is reshaping all jobs," said Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at labor analytics firm Revelio Labs. He pointed out that hiring for entry-level jobs is down in general, regardless of AI exposure. "AI-exposed entry-level jobs are seeing bigger drops in demand, but the difference to non-exposed jobs is small," he said. What AI is doing is forcing an "occupational transformation" among entry-level roles, Munyikwa said. For example, the firm's research has shown that tasks performed by junior-level professionals are shifting toward less AI-exposed functions. The most AI-exposed jobs tend to be technical, such as data engineers, database administrators, IT specialists, and cybersecurity personnel, as well as financial workers such as auditors, Munyikwa said. And in an interesting twist, the most exposed jobs are also adopting AI the most, making them more productive, he said. In some of these occupations, up to 30% of workers are already using AI to perform their day-to-day tasks, according to Revelio Labs' research, and for those who use these tools, the productivity gains can be significant. "Increases in productivity may eventually lead to fewer headcounts in certain job families, but also create jobs elsewhere," Munyikwa said. "While AI may currently have some productivity boosting capabilities, it needs to be applied and used consistently across large parts of the organization to take effect." That requires investments in AI tool training and thoughtful restructuring of job requirements and capabilities, Munyikwa said. "This will take a lot of time and careful leadership to even partially achieve big cost savings," he said. Jobs with low AI exposure frequently involve tasks that are difficult to automate, the Revelio Labs' research noted. These positions include manual jobs in manufacturing, hospitality roles, or interpersonal work, which still require a steady pipeline of human workers. Compared with 2010, demand for these roles has grown more quickly than for high-exposure roles, the research said. To be sure, AI is already eliminating some entry-level functions in companies. "Generally, jobs that are repetitive, rule-based, and easily codified are most at risk," Bajwa said. Many are not disappearing overnight but rather are being fundamentally transformed and restructured to involve more oversight and less manual work, he said. Although it is highly unlikely that there would be a significant impact on entry-level jobs in the short term, Bajwa said, "organizations must redesign how early talent is onboarded, developed, and integrated in order to navigate the decade ahead," he said. "Without foundational tasks, it's harder for people to build experience, leading to a fundamental gap in terms of how new professionals will build judgment, confidence and fluency." In fact, 54% of the 3,000 executives from Russell Reynolds' global network that the company surveyed are concerned that AI reliance is eroding critical thinking, and one-quarter are worried about AI inadvertently undermining product/service quality and critical internal process quality. A growing number of leaders across industries are also concerned about AI-driven layoffs, according to the RRA research. Last year 20% said they were concerned, compared with 40%in the latest survey. CIOs and other technology leaders need to be prepared for the impact of AI on current and future entry-level jobs within their departments, especially considering how aggressively many are launching AI initiatives. "It changes both talent strategy and team design," Bajwa said. "Tech leaders must now rethink how they develop junior talent and build future pipelines. The goal isn't just efficiency; it's ensuring AI-augmented teams can still grow, learn and lead," he said. With the possible reduction in some entry-level technology positions, there is a potential for more top-heavy team structures, Muniykwa said. "Tech leaders need to redesign workflows and roles as they implement AI," he said. Businesses will need new "on-ramps", for example, apprenticeships and AI-assisted boot camps, so early-career talent can still learn and advance even as some traditional entry-level tasks disappear, Munyikwa said. "Leaders must plan for continuous upskilling, not one-off training sessions, to keep teams productive alongside rapidly evolving AI tools," he said.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New data confirms it: AI is taking human jobs
In March, Shopify's CEO told his managers he was implementing a new rule: Before asking for more head count, they had to prove that AI couldn't do the job as well as a human would. A few weeks later, Duolingo's CEO announced a similar decree and went even further — saying the company would gradually phase out contractors and replace them with AI. The announcements matched what I've been hearing in my own conversations with employers: Because of AI, they are hiring less than before. When I first started reporting on ChatGPT's impact on the labor market, I thought it would take many years for AI to meaningfully reshape the job landscape. But in recent months, I've found myself wondering if the AI revolution has already arrived. To answer that question, I asked Revelio Labs, an analytics provider that aggregates huge reams of workforce data from across the internet, to see if it could tell which jobs are already being replaced by AI. Not in some hypothetical future, but right now — today. Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs, started by looking at the job descriptions in online postings and identifying the listed responsibilities that AI can already perform or augment. She found that over the past three years, the share of AI-doable tasks in online job postings has declined by 19%. After further analysis, she reached a startling conclusion: The vast majority of the drop took place because companies are hiring fewer people in roles that AI can do. Next, Munyikwa segmented all the occupations into three buckets: those with a lot of AI-doable tasks (high-exposure roles), those with relatively few AI-doable tasks (low-exposure roles), and those in between. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, she found, there has been a decline in job openings across the board. But the hiring downturn has been steeper for high-exposure roles (31%) than for low-exposure roles (25%). In short, jobs that AI can perform are disappearing from job boards faster than those that AI can't handle. Which jobs have the most exposure to AI? Those that handle a lot of tech functions: database administrators, IT specialists, information security, and data engineers. The jobs with the lowest exposure to AI, by contrast, are in-person roles like restaurant managers, foremen, and mechanics. This isn't the first analysis to show the early impact of AI on the labor market. In 2023, a group of researchers at Washington University and New York University homed in on a set of professionals who are particularly vulnerable: freelancers in writing-related occupations. After the introduction of ChatGPT, the number of jobs in those fields dropped by 2% on the freelancing platform Upwork — and monthly earnings declined by 5.2%. "In the short term," the researchers wrote, "generative AI reduces overall demand for knowledge workers of all types." At Revelio Labs, Munyikwa is careful about expanding on the implications of her own findings. It's unclear, she says, if AI in its current iteration is actually capable of doing all the white-collar work that employers think it can. It could be that CEOs at companies like Shopify and Duolingo will wake up one day and discover that hiring less for AI-exposed roles was a bad move. Will it affect the quality of the work or the creativity of employees — and, ultimately, the bottom line? The answer will determine how enduring the AI hiring standstill will prove to be in the years ahead. Some companies already appear to be doing an about-face on their AI optimism. Last year, the fintech company Klarna boasted that its investment in artificial intelligence had enabled it to put a freeze on human hiring. An AI assistant, it reported, was doing "the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents." But in recent months, Klarna has changed its tune. It has started hiring human agents again, acknowledging that its AI-driven cost-cutting push led to "lower quality." "It's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human," CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg. "Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us." Will there be more chastened Siemiatkowskis in the months and years ahead? I'm not betting on it. All across tech, chief executives share an almost religious fervor to have fewer employees around — employees who complain and get demotivated and need breaks in all the ways AI doesn't. At the same time, the AI tools at our disposal are getting better and better every month, enabling companies to shed employees. As long as that's the case, I'm not sure white-collar occupations face an optimistic future. Even Siemiatkowski still says he expects to reduce his workforce by another 500 through attrition in the coming year. And when Klarna's technology improves enough, he predicts, he'll be able to downsize at an even faster pace. Asked when that point will come, he replied: "I think it's very likely within 12 months." Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
02-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The AI future is already here
In March, Shopify 's CEO told his managers he was implementing a new rule: Before asking for more head count, they had to prove that AI couldn't do the job as well as a human would. A few weeks later, Duolingo 's CEO announced a similar decree and went even further — saying the company would gradually phase out contractors and replace them with AI. The announcements matched what I've been hearing in my own conversations with employers: Because of AI, they are hiring less than before. When I first started reporting on ChatGPT's impact on the labor market, I thought it would take many years for AI to meaningfully reshape the job landscape. But in recent months, I've found myself wondering if the AI revolution has already arrived. To answer that question, I asked Revelio Labs, an analytics provider that aggregates huge reams of workforce data from across the internet, to see if it could tell which jobs are already being replaced by AI. Not in some hypothetical future, but right now — today. Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs, started by looking at the job descriptions in online postings and identifying the listed responsibilities that AI can already perform or augment. She found that over the past three years, the share of AI-doable tasks in online job postings has declined by 19%. After further analysis, she reached a startling conclusion: The vast majority of the drop took place because companies are hiring fewer people in roles that AI can do. Next, Munyikwa segmented all the occupations into three buckets: those with a lot of AI-doable tasks (high-exposure roles), those with relatively few AI-doable tasks (low-exposure roles), and those in between. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, she found, there has been a decline in job openings across the board. But the hiring downturn has been steeper for high-exposure roles (31%) than for low-exposure roles (25%). In short, jobs that AI can perform are disappearing from job boards faster than those that AI can't handle. Which jobs have the most exposure to AI? Those that handle a lot of tech functions: database administrators, IT specialists, information security, and data engineers. The jobs with the lowest exposure to AI, by contrast, are in-person roles like restaurant managers, foremen, and mechanics. This isn't the first analysis to show the early impact of AI on the labor market. In 2023, a group of researchers at Washington University and New York University homed in on a set of professionals who are particularly vulnerable: freelancers in writing-related occupations. After the introduction of ChatGPT, the number of jobs in those fields dropped by 2% on the freelancing platform Upwork — and monthly earnings declined by 5.2%. "In the short term," the researchers wrote, "generative AI reduces overall demand for knowledge workers of all types." At Revelio Labs, Munyikwa is careful about expanding on the implications of her own findings. It's unclear, she says, if AI in its current iteration is actually capable of doing all the white-collar work that employers think it can. It could be that CEOs at companies like Shopify and Duolingo will wake up one day and discover that hiring less for AI-exposed roles was a bad move. Will it affect the quality of the work or the creativity of employees — and, ultimately, the bottom line? The answer will determine how enduring the AI hiring standstill will prove to be in the years ahead. Some companies already appear to be doing an about-face on their AI optimism. Last year, the fintech company Klarna boasted that its investment in artificial intelligence had enabled it to put a freeze on human hiring. An AI assistant, it reported, was doing "the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents." But in recent months, Klarna has changed its tune. It has started hiring human agents again, acknowledging that its AI-driven cost-cutting push led to "lower quality." "It's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human," CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg. "Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us." Will there be more chastened Siemiatkowskis in the months and years ahead? I'm not betting on it. All across tech, chief executives share an almost religious fervor to have fewer employees around — employees who complain and get demotivated and need breaks in all the ways AI doesn't. At the same time, the AI tools at our disposal are getting better and better every month, enabling companies to shed employees. As long as that's the case, I'm not sure white-collar occupations face an optimistic future. Even Siemiatkowski still says he expects to reduce his workforce by another 500 through attrition in the coming year. And when Klarna's technology improves enough, he predicts, he'll be able to downsize at an even faster pace. Asked when that point will come, he replied: "I think it's very likely within 12 months."
