AI's Impact on Jobs: Enhancement Over Replacement

Experts are still in the early stages of understanding just how much generative AI will disrupt the labor force. For now, AI tends to be enhancing workers, not replacing them. That was the key finding of a new report by MIT.

However, there is one exception: Adoption of generative AI did lead some firms to cut back spending on jobs that were often already being outsourced—things like customer support, software engineering, and administrative tasks.

"Coding, writing, documentation," said Pradyumna Chari, one of the authors. "All of these are some simple aspects where we do think AI is already playing a big role in business."

But the report found that mostly there were not big headcount reductions. It makes sense, since AI tools so far are often helping workers write emails or documents, according to Christopher Stanton, Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard.

"The broad nature of work hasn't changed to reflect AI, other than sort of some time savings," he said.

Whether some jobs are augmented or automated may not be simply a matter of technology, said Tom Mitchell with Carnegie Mellon University.

"It'll be a matter of businesses evolving their business processes to figure out how to incorporate these capabilities," he said.

That’s why procedures where it’s easy to plug in AI, like customer service, are one of the first places we’re seeing a shift.