Many companies have been blaming artificial intelligence (AI) for job cuts, but American research and advisory firm Gartner predicted in early February that half of them may regret doing so and may even end up rehiring workers by next year but under different job titles.
Twenty-year product leader and AI strategist Nate B. Jones said he believes Gartner is right, as AI without smart people behind it doesn’t really work.
In a TikTok video he posted on March 12, he said, “AI takes really, really smart people to build, maintain, and operate it. And not just engineers. People who understand the domain the AI is operating.”
So, if a company is building a customer service back-end automation system, it needs to have “really sharp customer service people to understand what is worth doing, what is not worth doing, and how you evolve and respond to ongoing customer concerns so the system is alive and growing and evolving,” he added.
He also encouraged everyone to look at the “movement of AI agents” as a “movement to expand the scope and impact that people can have at work.”
He added, warning that some people will “misuse that power,” but there are also “a lot who are gonna do cool things with it.”
“The key to realising impact in the age of AI is actually not more AI, less people, like it’s a one-to-one trade-off. It is people thinking really creatively and figuring out how to build something and then putting the work in to sustain it and keep it going.”
Gartner Senior Director Analyst of customer service and support practice, Kathy Ross, said, “AI-driven layoffs have captured attention”, but the truth is, “most recent workforce reductions were influenced by broader economic conditions rather than automation alone.”
In an earlier report by The Independent Singapore, analysts shared similar sentiments: that businesses AI-washing their job cuts may have really been struggling with tariffs, overhiring during the pandemic, or just looking to trim costs to maximise their profits.
Within the last six months, some companies that have carried out AI-driven massive layoffs include Amazon and Block, and just recently, HSBC is reportedly considering up to 20,000 AI-driven job cuts. /TISG
Read also: Ex-manager says ‘AI is just a cover story’ for Amazon layoffs
