Should AI Impact Your Open Roles?

In May, IBM announced a plan to slow hiring by roughly 7,800 jobs that they anticipate can be replaced by AI. While IBM is a rare company to say the AI part out loud, I don’t think this is limited to just IBM.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks JOLTS (the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) which provides a snapshot of what has happened in the past. It doesn’t necessarily tell you why but I suspect that in their numbers a similar story is unfolding.

From March to April, job openings fell in the following sectors:

• Information: down 7000 openings in the month, and 100,000 year over year
• Professional and business services: down 57,000 openings in the month, and 561,000 year over year

There are other things happening in the economy of course but I think these numbers show an anticipation that a lot of previously necessary roles might not be so necessary anymore.

I called this trend out in April when I wrote:

“If you are about to hire another person to expand an existing team in a creative or analytical role, pause.”

Why pause on hiring?

The rapid adoption of GPT, Bard, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in general has given a lot of high performing employees a power tool to make them more efficient and effective. I think the logical result of this is:

If you take high performing employees and make them even better, you don’t need as many of them.

What does this mean for companies and job seekers?

I think a lot of companies are going to find they can get the same or more work done with smaller teams over the next 6–12 months. This happens in a recession normally; cuts to staff get made, business adapts, and low value work that shouldn’t have been done anyway gets dropped.

What’s different this time is an external spike in productivity that a lot of people will see because of LLMs. As companies rebound, they might not need to hire back anyone to sustain growth. Knowledge workers who get laid off may find it’s very hard to find companies that need them for a long time.

I will not be surprised if the size of the average company is smaller next year than it is today. I bet some companies will be an order of magnitude smaller but producing the same value for their customers.

What can you as a leader do?

Yes! Like all technological improvements, we will see new roles get created but it’s going to take time to figure out. So what do you do as a leader today?

My recommendations:

• If you‘re thinking about hiring more people to expand current teams, pause. Encourage your people to use the new tolls available to become more efficient.
• Think about your business: what things have gone from “time consuming and not worth the effort” to “fast, quick wins” if you’re using AI?
• Prototype: make small investments of time and money to see if the economics are different. Invest in growth in areas you were ignoring before.

The last bullet is the key. If you can use AI to your advantage you can grow your business, take care of your customers, and take care of your people. That’s going to take experimentation and you can’t afford to wait.

Not sure where to get started?

If your not sure what this means for your team, message me on LinkedIn. I’d love to help you brainstorm how to take advantage of AI today to make your business stronger.