Tech bosses at Davos bet on AI jobs despite layoff reality

“Energy is creating jobs. The chip industry is creating jobs. The infrastructure layer is creating jobs, ” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement to Reuters. “Jobs, jobs, jobs,” he added.

While scepticism around AI remained as delegates discussed how AI chatbots led consumers to suicide and psychosis, the labour union asked about the cost of the technological advancements.

In a statement to Reuters, Christy Hoffman, the general secretary of UNI Global Union, said, “AI is being sold as a productivity tool, which often means doing more with fewer workers.”

During an interview with the publication, Matthew Prince, the CEO of internet security company Cloudflare, which powers almost half the internet, said in Davos that AI would keep getting better in the coming years and that developers may be able to overcome market or funding blips.

He also warned that AI could become so powerful in the future that small businesses would evaporate as AI agents handle shopping requests.

IBM’s chief commercial officer, Rob Thomas, said that the technology has already reached a stage where we will soon see a return on investment. “You can truly start to automate tasks and business processes,” he said.

But a recent survey by the advisory firm PwC suggests that only one in eight CEOs believed AI was helping them lower costs and get more revenue.

Cisco, one of the largest networking companies in the world, said things that required at least 19 man-years of work were now being done in a couple of weeks. “The way in which we code actually was rethought, ” company President Jeetu Patel said in an interview.

BlackRock’s chief operating officer, Rob Goldstein, told the media during a roundtable that the world’s largest asset manager had managed to secure almost $700 billion in net new client assets last year and looked at AI as a means to expand business instead of making reductions to the workforce.

“We’re very focused on keeping our headcount flat as we continue to grow,” he added.

While some companies do say they won’t reduce workforce, Amazon is reportedly planning a second wave of job cuts next week, with numbers estimated at around 30,000.

According to Luc Triangle, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, one reason why workers are anxious about jobs is that they have very little say in the rollout of AI. This is why they see it as a threat, he said.

However, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said that we need to “get ready for the opportunities and disruption that AI will bring. Your economy gets more productive. That’s typically a good thing.”

“There certainly are problems, but they’re all solvable problems,” he added.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, talked about his goal of making humans an interplanetary species. “For quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right,” Musk told a hall full of reporters.