Fears about Artificial Intelligence making millions jobless are unfounded, finds Gartner. By 2025, AI will create two million net new jobs. In the process, it may take away several repetitive jobs from humans and create for them new positions that need higher levels of skills and management capabilities.

According to Gartner, 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related employment dynamics as it will become a positive job motivator. Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025.

“Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner. During the temporary phase, the number of jobs affected by AI will vary by industry.

Through 2019 healthcare, the public sector and education will see continuously growing job demand while manufacturing will be hit the hardest. AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, eliminating millions of middle- and low-level positions, but also creating millions more new positions of highly skilled category, management levels and even some in the entry-level and low-skilled variety.

Echoing the views of Gartner, Sonal Arora, VP, Teamlease, finds that new technologies, including AI, automation and machine learning will not take away jobs as is being perceived widely. But there will change in the nature of jobs. “The situation is similar to what had happened when computers came into our lives. Jobs may not vanish as is perceived, but the nature would probably change giving way to more highly-skilled functions,’ she said. 

In 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity. While many industries will receive growing business value from AI, manufacturing is one that will receive a massive share of the business value opportunity. Automation will lead to cost savings, while the removal of friction in value chains will increase revenue further, for example, in the optimization of supply chains and go-to-market activities.

Another study by Ficci, Nasscom and EY finds that India too will be witnessing a churn in terms of nature of jobs. The future of jobs in 2022 in India will be determined by the country’s response to the three primary forces - globalization, demographic changes and the adoption of Industry 4.0/exponential technologies by Indian industries. These primary forces will have a significant impact on jobs through a combination of new jobs that will be created, a section of jobs that will require significantly new skill sets, and a set of jobs that may cease to exist. The study finds that 9 per cent of the workforce will be deployed in new jobs that do not exist today, 37 per cent in jobs whose skill-sets would have changed and 54 per cent would have jobs unchanged.

According to Gartner, IT leaders making investments in AI-enabled technologies, must consider what jobs will be lost, what jobs will be created, and how it will transform the way workers collaborate with others, make decisions and get work done.

“For the greatest value, focus on augmenting people with AI. Enrich people's jobs, reimagine old tasks and create new industries. Transform your culture to make it rapidly adaptable to AI-related opportunities or threats," said Sicular.

AI will first be applied to highly repeatable tasks where large quantities of observations and decisions can be analyzed for patterns. By 2022, one in five workers engaged in mostly non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do a job. Applying AI to less-routine work that is more varied due to lower repeatability will soon start yielding superior benefits -assisting humans than replace them as combinations of humans and machines will perform more effectively than either human experts or AI-driven machines working alone will.

Once knowledge workers incorporate AI into their work processes as a virtual secretary or intern, robo-employees will become a competitive necessity. In retail, AI can disrupt cashier and operational jobs, but it may not be able to replace sales associates. Leveraging technologies such as AI and robotics, retailers will use intelligent process automation to identify, optimize and automate labor-intensive and repetitive activities that are currently performed by humans, reducing labor costs through efficiency from headquarters to distribution centers and stores. Many retailers are already expanding technology use to improve the in-store check-out process.

"Retailers will be able to make labor savings by eliminating highly repetitive and transactional jobs, but will need to reinvest some of those savings into training associates who can enhance the customer experience," said Robert Hetu, research director at Gartner "As such most retailers will come to view AI as a way to augment customer experiences rather than just removing humans from every process,” he added.