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In 2023, IBM, one of the oldest technology companies in the world, announced that it would lay off nearly 8,000 employees within the framework of process automation in favor of AI. However, contrary to the initial plans, this strategy led to the hiring of even more people within a year.
The first cuts were made to the support services, where they planned to automate up to 30% «repetitive tasks», and HR departments with up to 94% automation. In the latter case, the company used an AI agent called AskHR to take over vacation processing, payroll, and documentation control.
In fact, the result of AskHR’s work is very revealing: in 2024, the AI agent had 11.5 million interactions, and the level of customer satisfaction (NPS) increased from -35 to +74 just in the last couple of years. According to IBM itself, the platform has saved $3.5 billion in more than 70 business lines.
What’s interesting here is that within a year, something happened that even the management itself did not expect — the total number of employees grew to a figure higher than before the round of layoffs.
«While we’ve done a lot of work to leverage artificial intelligence, our overall employment has actually increased because it’s allowed us to invest more in other areas,» explained IBM boss Arvind Krishna (the same one who previously stated that AI will not replace programmers) in an interview with Wall Street Journal.
In fact, automation has freed up financial and human resources, which were eventually redistributed to high value-added sectors — massive hiring has affected software engineers, salespeople, and marketers, i.e. areas where critical thinking and interaction are indispensable to machines. Hence, the other side of the AI model: yes, the technology takes away some jobs, but it also creates new ones or improves the work of existing ones.
IBM is not the only tech giant that has started automating routine processes with the help of AI laid off 6000 people with similar plans, mainly software engineers, after CEO Satya Nadella said that more than a quarter of new code in the company is written by AI and called for this figure to be increased to 50%.
According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, by 2030, as a result of process automation, almost 92 million jobs may disappear. Although new professions will appear at a frantic pace (unfortunately, the number of forecasted professions is not given).