Why AI won’t cut jobs: A Computer Weekly Downtime upload podcast

A survey conducted by analyst Gartner of 350 respondents in organisations that are more advanced in their use of AI agents and intelligent automation, reported that 80% had seen some degree of job cuts following their implementation of AI.

Discussing the survey with Computer Weekly, Gartner distinguished vice president analyst, Helen Poitevin says: “There are job cuts, but if you're getting more ROI (return on investment), you're actually not cutting more jobs.”  

Poitevin does not believe reducing headcount to fund AI investment is a viable strategy long-term. She says: “The belief is there that if we invest in this technology, we somehow have to make the trade-off by decreasing spend on personnel or decreasing spending on headcount. But what our research shows is while that may help cash balances in the short term, in the long term, the real ROI - those organisations who are getting the most benefit from AI - actually heavily invest in people.” 

According to Poitevin, such organisations are much more likely to be building new skills, creating roles for orchestrating agents, and more likely to be mapping out career paths for their people moving forward. “What we see is that it's actually short-sighted only thinking about headcount as the form of value instead of thinking much more broadly about value,” she says. 

Poitevin believes that trying to emulate the tech giants, which are making big job cuts as part of their long-term AI strategy, is not the right approach. “They are going after new forms of value where AI is a core part of their business, and the trade-offs they're making is that they believe it's just about productivity and headcount,” she says. For Poitevin, reducing headcount has a detrimental effect on business in the long run. 

Some people will argue that AI is taking away junior roles, such as in software develoment, which reduces the opportunity for people to gain job-related experience early on in their careers. Poitevin says: “This is another case of shortsightedness.” Rather than believing that AI will essentially replace these people, she says businesses need to consider what tasks go away, and which ones remains when AI is deployed in certain job roles. 

For instance, in software development, a measure of success is how quickly can code be produced to deliver the outcome the business requires, 

If AI accelerates the organisation's ability to get from a problem to a solution, as Poitevin notes, this means the software development team is able to tackle more problems. From an IT leadership perspectibve, she says: “Those who are creatively looking forward to how they build their future with software are definitely doubling down on making sure they have the talent pipeline to enable them to build up junior software engineers so that they go more quickly from the business problem to the software solution. “It's a bit of a Jevons paradox and it'll actually create more demand,” she adds. In other words, the more efficient a business gets at developing the software it needs, the cheaper producing software becomes. "So you get more efficient at solving problems with software, which means there's more demand, and therefore more demand for the people who can do that kind of work,” she adds.