Enlarge / The IBM logo in front of an AI-generated background. (credit: IBM / Midjourney)
IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna has revealed plans to halt hiring for about 7,800 positions that could be replaced by artificial intelligence systems in the near future, according to a Bloomberg news report published Monday.
Krishna said that hiring in back-office functions like human resources will be suspended or slowed, affecting roughly 26,000 non-customer-facing roles. "I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," Bloomberg quoted Krisha as saying in an interview.
The announcement comes at a time when generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT have stirred anxiety about the future of human jobs. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that generative AI may "expose" 300 million jobs to automation, which means those roles might be reduced or replaced by AI systems.