AI News Monitor

Experts have highlighted skills that AI agents could make redundant on the job market.

AI will have a seismic impact on the job market by being better than humans at computer-based tasks, say experts at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Companies are expected to adopt the more efficient AI agents as they become popular and mainstream. AI agents are capable of performing tasks that human customer service agents, HR staff or IT help desk persons have performed in the past.

AI chatbots are already commonplace as help desk “staff” that help users register queries and receive customer service. The Institute for Public Policy Research conducted a study of 22,000 common tasks performed by workers and found that up to 70% of them can be performed by AI agents. According to the report, adoption of AI for these tasks will have great impact on jobs in project management, marketing and administrative support.

Many tech company executives have said in the past that the role of AI is to help workers with their tasks and streamline their workload, not to replace them entirely. However, this sentiment may be challenged by the fact that AI agents are specifically designed to act autonomously.

An AI agent is “not merely a tool,” says Carsten Jung, head of AI at the IPPR. “It is an actor.” As the labor market is transformed by the use of AI, workers in computer-based jobs might need to acquire more skills to remain relevant.

In January, Mark Zuckerberg claimed in an interview that even software engineering jobs might soon be at risk. According to the Meta CEO, AI agents will soon be able to handle most coding at big tech companies, promising even more effectiveness and efficiency. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman also made similar statements about the future of coding.

As a result, many tech workers are expanding into areas such as machine learning. Such expansion of skills into more relevant areas is key to the survival of workers. It could place them in a strong position to take advantage of the newer opportunities that the AI boom will inevitably provide as it transforms the job sector, says the World Economic Forum.

In its study, the IPPR recommends greater political oversight over AI agents, given the greater role they are bound to play in society. Beyond just making sure that AI is safe, the body warns that there needs to be more democratic debate and closer scrutiny of how it is deployed.