More and more tech CEOs are talking about how AI threatens to disrupt many jobs that people have been taking for granted over the years.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has said that AI will lead to the loss of some jobs. He even said that he’s asking his teams to slow down the number of new hires and look for AI to solve problems. However he said that while AI will replace some jobs, it will enable organizations to become more efficient, which could lead to the creation of new jobs.
“There are certainly jobs that are going to go away,” Robbins said on the impact of AI in an interview with CNBC TV-18. “Any massive new technology shift will ultimately replace jobs. Even the advent of the internet replaced jobs. That’s going to happen,” he said.
Robbins said that he had instructed his team to look to solve problems with AI as opposed to hiring new employees. “But over time, what I’m telling my team is figure out how you can make your teams more productive, and mitigate the number of new hires you need,” he said.
He also clearly laid two two paths that companies had in the face of the changes brought about by AI — one beneficial in the short term, and one in the long term. “You can look at this in two ways as a CEO. You can look at it as enabling your organization to move faster, deliver more innovation and do greater things for your customers more quickly than you used to be able to. Or you can say I’m going to make my company more efficient, and I’m going to increase my EPS by cutting costs. I think that’s interesting in the near term. But if your competitors take the other path, you lose (in the long term),” he said.
Robbins was implying that AI would lead to cost savings in the short term. But companies that invested in AI and discovered new workflows and products would eventually win out in the long term. “So I think you’re going to see people aggressively use AI to try to move faster. For instance, we’re using AI coding capabilities not to eliminate a bunch of engineers, but to increase the speeds of innovation we’re able to deliver to our customers,” he said.
Chuck Robbins’s predictions are similar to those by other leaders in tech. Amazon has said that it expects its corporate workforce to shrink in the next few years because of AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will eliminate many jobs, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar entry jobs in 5 years. It remains to be seen what the extent of the AI-led job disruption is, but most CEOs seem to agree that while AI will eliminate jobs, it will also create new jobs. And jobseekers and early career professionals would do well to keep a keen eye on how AI is shifting the jobs landscape.