Generative AI will ‘replace 300 million jobs’, says Goldman Sachs

Artificial intelligence could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, according to research by Goldman Sachs.

The investment bank said that recent advances in generative AI tools such as ChatGPT mean the technology will be able to create content “indistinguishable” from human output, leading to a productivity boom but also costing jobs.

The advancement led by generative AI could lead to gross domestic product increases of as much as 7% over 10 years, it predicted.

Around two-thirds of jobs in the US and Europe would be exposed to some degree of AI automation, but most people would see less than half of their workload automated.

In the US, it calculated that 63% of the workforce would be impacted by AI, and a further 30% working in physical or outdoor jobs would be unaffected, although their work might be susceptible to other forms of automation.The impact would be similar in Europe, it predicted.

Overall, AI could take over around a fifth of all jobs globally, taking into account that a higher proportion of work in the developing world is manual.

Goldman Sachs based its predictions on analysis of US and European data on tasks typically performed in thousands of occupations. It believes AI will be capable of tasks such as completing tax returns for small businesses, evaluating insurance claims or documenting evidence in investigations.

The impact of AI will differ across sectors, according to the research. Just under half (46%) of tasks in administrative functions will be automated, it said, and 44% in legal professions. Only 6% of tasks in construction could be performed by AI.

In HR, some experts have predicted it could be useful for tasks such as generating policies, although human input would still be required to ensure they were ethically sound and non-discriminatory.

This week talent management technology company Beamery announced the launch of a generative AI tool – Talent GPT – that could be used to generate job descriptions and provide career recommendations to employees.

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Analyst company Gartner has also recently highlighted that around half of HR professionals are introducing policies to regulate the use of ChatGPT at work.

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