The fears of AI replacing jobs may be a bit overblown, with the CEO of IBM admitting the technology has made some roles redundant, but also noting that it has created a lot more jobs in the process.
AI has taken the business world by storm in recent years, with virtually every company under the sun implementing some kind of automated technology to improve productivity.
This has spurred serious concerns that unemployment will become rampant as the tech evolves, but one CEO has noted that it’s creating a lot more opportunities than it’s eliminating.
AI Replaces Jobs, But Allows for Investment in Other Areas
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna noted that AI has, in fact, replaced some jobs at the firm, but that the additional revenue from the productivity improvements has allowed them to hire more employees with different skillsets.
“While we have done a huge amount of work inside IBM on leveraging AI and automation on certain enterprise workflows, our total employment has actually gone up, because what it does is it gives you more investment to put into other areas.” – IBM CEO Arvind Krishna
Krishna also explained that the areas in which the company is investing are focused on “critical thinking,” more specifically “face up or against other humans, as opposed to just doing rote process work.”
Is AI Job Replacement Overblown?
The promises of modern AI being a world-changing technology that will replace every job under the sun have been nothing if not prevalent. Even Bill Gates said just a few weeks ago that most jobs would be obsolete in just ten years, and that we wouldn’t need humans “for most things.”
However, big tech and its many executives wax poetic about the potential of this technology, very few real-world examples have shown promise. One study found that AI user report time savings of just 2.8% of work hours (about one hour a week) on average.
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Another experiment saw researchers creating an entire company out of AI agents, only for the business to fail spectacularly when it could only accomplish 25% of designated tasks.
Should Your Business Use AI?
We won’t mince words. In 2025, businesses need to be adopting some level of AI technology to improve productivity, if only to keep pace with the rest of the world.
According to our Impact of Technology on the Workplace, only 15% of businesses state they have not used AI at all. More notably, that number was 33% just last year, so the adoption rates are spiking.
More importantly, though, if you are going to use AI, you need to have a policy in place. Only 27% of businesses have implemented AI policies that regulate what employees can and can’t do with AI, which could have negative long term impacts on the effectiveness of your employees and the security of your company data.
