AI will make it much harder to get new jobs, especially for people who work in industries that are most vulnerable to AI disruption, career experts told Business Insider.
The advent of AI is a major wake-up call for customer service representatives, cashiers, clerical workers and production workers: Georgios Petropoulos, a labor market and digital technology researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that “middle-skilled” workers are the ones most likely to lose their jobs to AI.
While high-skilled workers are likely to adopt AI for their existing jobs, and trades like plumbers and electricians will see continued demand for their services, Petropoulos predicts that mid-skilled workers will be in limbo for decades to come as AI becomes more mainstream.
“We’re seeing a polarization of the job market,” Petropoulos told Business Insider in an interview.
While Petropoulos doesn’t have an exact estimate, he expects unemployment rates for middle-skilled workers to rise as the economy transitions to an AI-driven labor market, a transition that could take as long as 20 years, he added.
“There will be more high-skill jobs, more low-skill jobs and fewer middle-skill jobs.”
As the impact of AI ripples across the US job market, McKinsey Global Institute director Quaylin Ellingrud expects demand for low-skilled workers to decrease: McKinsey estimates that 12 million workers will need to find entirely different careers by 2030, roughly the same number of job changes that have taken place during the pandemic.
Over the next decade, there could be 630,000 fewer cashiers, 710,000 fewer office workers and 830,000 fewer salespeople, according to McKinsey estimates. In a report last year, the firm said the number of office workers across all industries could fall by as much as 1.6 million.
“Typical jobs will require a higher level of skill than they did before,” Ellingrud said of increased competition in the job market. “The simpler jobs, the more repetitive jobs that can be easily done by machines, or by generative AI models now, will be done by those models.”
A divided job market
According to the McKinsey report, generative artificial intelligence holds great promise for boosting productivity and adding jobs to the economy, but job gains will be concentrated mainly in sectors such as healthcare and STEM fields.
Meanwhile, employers outside these fields are already raising the bar for the talent they hire: A May survey by Microsoft and LinkedIn found that 66% of business leaders wouldn’t hire someone who didn’t know how to use AI, and 71% would prefer candidates with less experience and knowledge of AI.
As a result, employees feel pressured to step up and become more competitive in the eyes of potential employers.
Online learning platform Coursera has seen demand for its Gen AI course surge 1,060% this year, which equates to someone enrolling in an AI-related course every 15 seconds, according to Coursera CEO Jeff Majoncalda.
“Will the labour market become more competitive? It definitely already is,” Majoncalda told BI, noting that workers who do not upskill will face difficulties in the labour market.
Majoncalda noted that Coursera is also making an effort to train its employees in AI, with some employees now taking mandatory classes in AI skills.
“I often say to my employees, ‘I see you haven’t really used GPT to create this presentation or write this piece. Run it through a model to sharpen your thinking. It’s not clear enough yet. My expectations for speed and clarity of thought are much higher than they were two years ago,'” Majoncalda added. “I don’t think there’s much of a safety net for knowledge workers who didn’t really learn AI, for example. They’ll lose their jobs.”
Ellingrud speculates that it could take years for workers displaced by AI to retrain and become competitive in a labor market where AI is more deeply integrated. On average, she believes it will take workers three to five years to adjust to the new employment environment.
“I think that tomorrow’s workers will need more flexibility than they did 10 years ago, and that’s mainly because of these career transitions,” she says. “So while you may not want to learn a particular skill or be passionate about it, I think the flexibility to move between different careers will be more desirable in the future than it has been in the past.”
