As artificial intelligence is making its way into the workforce and potentially automating jobs, IBM Corp. is already talking about how that will affect the future of its workers as the company plans to pause hiring for back-office jobs that could be done by AI.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said that hiring for non-customer-facing roles, such as human resources and accounting, would be paused or slowed over the next few years.

These roles represent approximately 26,000 employees and Krishna said that he could “easily see” about 30% of those roles being replaced by AI and automation over the next five years. That would account for about 7,800 jobs lost.

Much of the recent furor around AI has been its ability to perform rote knowledge tasks such as chatbots automating text-based customer service roles, sending and replying to emails, summarizing meeting notes, doing research and other knowledge work. Generative AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 have proven highly capable of producing extremely coherent summation of reports and even generating understandable insights from large bodies of text.

Krishna said certain tasks such as employment verification and moving employees between departments would most likely be automated away in the future. However, tasks that require more complex assessment, such as workforce evaluations for productivity and composition would probably take a decade before they would be replaced by AI automation.

According to a report from Fortune, IBM has already been benefiting from the fruits of AI and machine learning by implementing it in its HR department, which estimated that it helped save the company almost $1 billion since 2011.

IBM announced it planned to lay off 3,900 workers in January, amid what appeared to be upbeat financial results. Although the layoffs could potentially lead to a total of 5,000 people being let go, Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM has brought on more employees overall, adding more than 7,000 new workers in the first quarter.

Automation has long been a disruptive force in workplaces and generative AI’s capabilities are the latest example of that trend. A report from the banking firm Goldman Sachs estimated that more than 300 million jobs could be displaced or diminished by AI, although at the same time the innovative technology could also produce new types of jobs – although it’s hard to tell what they will be at this time.

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