To say there’s anxiety around what AI will mean for jobs is an understatement.
But there are nuanced ways to think about this and, according to the CEO of one company at the forefront of experimenting with AI, perhaps less to worry about than we might otherwise have thought.
“The good news is that there’s not a single job anywhere that AI can perform all of the skills required for that job,” Indeed CEO Chris Hyams told the audience at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit in Dana Point, Calif. on Monday, describing the findings of Indeed’s labor economists. “It doesn’t mean it won’t replace workers, but AI can’t completely replace a job.”
Simultaneously, Indeed’s findings have also shown that “for about two-thirds of all jobs, 50% or more of those skills are things that today’s generative AI can do reasonably well, or very well.”
These two seemingly at-odds findings point to a seismic shift underway—not a simple scenario where entire sectors vanish overnight, but a far more complex transformation where jobs are undeniably evolving.
“What that says is that pretty much every job is going to change if it’s not changing already,” Hyams said onstage. “It’s going to happen rapidly. I’m personally expecting—I’ve been doing this for a little over 30 years—that if you look at the change that’s happened because of the internet to pretty much every line of work, there are a handful of occupations over the next three years that will see 30 years of change. So, what we’re seeing is that people are going to have to adapt very, very quickly to how they work, but also how they hire and how they find jobs.”
Julia Villagra, OpenAI Chief People Officer, shares Hyams’s belief that a lot is about to change.
“I think one of the things that we need to do at this moment is actually to start changing the way we talk about job replacement,” Villagra told the audience. “I think this is really about something bigger than that. It’s about a reimagination of jobs. It’s about redistribution of how we work. And as a people person and an optimist, I have a lot of faith and optimism about how humans throughout history have actually adapted and leveraged technology for progress.”
“At the end of the day, if there’s one thing I do want to communicate, it’s that the best answer to fear and anxiety is actually knowledge and understanding,” Villagra added. “So, that’s why it’s so critical that companies put this technology in the hands of employees.”
Indeed’s Hyams feels strongly that AI adoption can’t come from top-down mandates, and instead is best served by grassroots enthusiasm. His advice to companies looking to double-down on AI adoption: Find internal champions excited about AI, and let them demonstrate practical benefits to colleagues.
“Finding the champions, giving people a chance to figure out what works for them, and then letting them be the spokespeople—that has been so much more effective for us,” said Hyams.
Hyams shaded Marc Andreessen’s recent comments about VC being the last job left after AI reaches maturity.
“I may be in the minority, but I disagree with the concept of fewer people in the workforce,” he said. “I know that’s a very popular opinion. There’s some very important people in this world saying that the only job left at the end of all will be venture capitalist—it was a venture capitalist who said that.”
Hyams is ultimately comfortable with the embedded contradiction of talking about AI and how it will change labor.
“I think we’re going to go through a period for the next couple of years where people are looking for ways to cut costs, with the economy being as volatile and unpredictable as it is right now,” he said. “So, we’re going to see jobs slowing down, hiring slowing down. And I think we’re going to find just what we have with every other type of technological advancement of the last 400 years—that we’re going to be able to do so much more.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie GarfinkleX: @agarfinksEmail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.comSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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