IBM CEO Arvind Krishna: AI won't eviscerate jobs

• Amodei also said AI could cause unemployment to jump to 10-20% in the next one to five years.
• A month later, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company's workforce would decline as a result of AI.

Krishna argued AI will be largely additive to employment while acknowledging that certain clerical positions will be mostly eliminated.

• "You're going to need more people, but they're going to be in slightly different places because you're more and more productive over time," he said.

Zoom in: IBM itself is already using AI to eliminate costs.

• The company this week raised its cost-cutting forecast stemming from AI and automation from $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion annually by the end of 2025.
• But "our total employment is constant," Krishna said. "The nature of the jobs changes."

• Case in point: Use of AI led to the elimination of a "couple hundred human resources workers at IBM," Krishna told the Wall Street Journal in May. That led to the company hiring more programmers and salespeople, he said at the time.

The intrigue: Krishna said he believes there will be limits on how much more productive AI can make software coders — about 30%, he estimated.

• Most of coding will be automated, he said, but humans will shift their time to reviewing code for quality control.

The bottom line: The debate over AI's impact is far from settled.