There are two main and contradictory schools of thought on the impact of AI on the jobs market. The positive spin is that the technology will be an indispensable companion to workers, giving tips, providing crucial information, and doing all those boring repetitive tasks so humans can focus on the value-add. The other less rosy version is that AI will lead to countless job cuts as it takes over so many of the work tasks humans currently do.
At Workday Rising, the company’s leadership team gave its thoughts on the situation, acknowledging the risk to entry-level jobs while outlining the urgent need for reskilling.
Aneel Bhusri, Workday Co-Founder and CEO, admitted to having concerns about the prospects for college graduates to find work, as a result of companies looking at the benefits of AI and slowing down their hires:
I think that’s going to be impacted and that is not a good sign. We have to solve that as a society in these first-world countries because a lot of those jobs are entry-level jobs that probably AI could do but they can’t do the next job or the next job after that.We need to make sure that we don’t have high unemployment numbers of folks coming out of college. That’s what I worry about in the US, and I think that’s a challenge in Europe as well.”
While there’s concern around the impact of AI on jobs, especially at the entry-level, Gerrit Kazmaier, President, Product and Technology at Workday, pointed to a dichotomy as many industries are struggling to access the required talent. The healthcare industry, for example, is less constrained by the number of beds and more by the number of healthcare practitioners available to attend to patients, he noted:
It’s not that universally it is the case that there is enough labor supply in the market. There are actually markets which are severely constrained [due to] the labor.
But while every previous major technology transition has created more jobs and more opportunities than existed beforehand, that doesn’t mean all jobs stay the same. Kazmaier said:
The biggest [problem] right now is that we are producing new graduates that are being trained in a pre-AI world and now being thrown into an AI-led workplace. There is a big disconnect, because what you are right now taking on a job to do, that’s not really what the market right now is requiring.
Re-skilling investment
How to build the skills necessary for AI is where the focus should be, as that is what will ensure people stay relevant. Kazmaier explained:
Look in the job market today, AI roles are going through the roof. AI engineer, AI marketing, AI sales, they’re the biggest growing job profiles other people are posting and guess what? There’s a big shortage of people actually being able to grow into these roles quickly. Investing in education, investing in reskilling, that’s the answer.
While there’s potential that products like Workday’s new Work Intelligence tool could be used to decide on headcount reductions, which breaks down jobs into tasks and shows which ones could be automated, Kazmaier maintained the opposite is true.
Instead, Work Intelligence is designed to combine humans and AI to drive growth for companies. Businesses can support the talent they have with AI to be more efficient, and they won’t need to hire to grow. Kazmaier noted:
That is incredibly valuable. Actually, that protects jobs. Because you don’t have that up and down anymore.
Companies can also reassemble their organization more dynamically, as it moves away from the traditional way of looking at work, org charts and teams, to tasks and missions and dynamic work assembly. He added:
The people working in organizations have much greater impact with the work that they do and you never get into a situation where you actually think of headcount as a fungible resource that you can grow and decline. You think of it as a strategic asset.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make about AI companies, according to Kazmaier, is around their attitude to talent. The assumption is that their access to the technology negates the need to build a great team. But that’s not the case, he said:
They are very focused on hiring, retaining the best possible talent because they know that this is where they get all of the impact from AI from. If it would be different, it would be AI companies using agents, it would be all AI on one side and no humans about. That’s not what you’re seeing anywhere.
Re-training program
Joel Hellermark, Chief AI Officer at Workday, who joined the firm as part of the Sana acquisition, outlined an example of where AI has facilitated a huge retraining program, resulting in thousands of people being redeployed from one industry no longer in need, to another with an urgent staff shortage.
During the pandemic, Sana was involved in reskilling flight attendants to support hospitals. Hellermark explained:
That was something that historically would have taken a year to go through the program. We ended up reskilling 200,000 people to serve in those roles. And the way we could do it was that we had personalized learning and we had AI-based reskilling, which means that we could directly target exactly what they have to learn, we could teach it in a very personal way.
The concern for Hellermark around the adoption of AI is the rate at which the transformation is going to happen:
We’re used to it happening every decade or so, and those timelines will massively compress. And thus we will need to reskill way faster than we have done historically.
Using AI to build advanced tools to accelerate reskilling is a focus area for the company, to help deal with this rapid shift. Hellermark said:
We’re tool builders and we want to build the best tools to support this transition.
Workday is already investing in various programs to tackle the re-skilling challenge. The firm was one of the early partners of Raise US, which aims to get the American workforce ready for an AI-led world. Bhusri explained:
A lot of the tech organizations have gotten together and we’ve donated a lot of money to basically reskill people and that really is the answer to all of this is re-skilling. We’re looking at other organizations like that around the globe, but re-skilling is on us.
He also pointed to the Workday Foundation, which has a similar mission around retraining and reskilling people for AI-ready roles. In Europe, the Workday Foundation funds organisations like Ada – The National College for Digital Skills and INCO, and the company has recently launched an AI upskilling programme in partnership with Technology Ireland.
Job cuts
Bhusri was also keen to use the opportunity of the discussion around jobs and AI to address the company’s own recent layoffs, which saw around 900 people lose their roles this year. Despite a raft of job losses across the tech industry coinciding with the rapid uptake of generative AI, Bhusri said in Workday’s case, this was purely incidental:
I want to address those cuts that we had recently had. Those were not tied to AI. All these companies talk about cutting jobs because they’re using AI, and that’s not what we were doing.
Instead, the cuts were to remove bloat from the business:
We were a bloated organization. Gerrit and I sat down. There were some parts of the development organization, 10 layers between me and the developer getting work done. And it was the actual individual contributors, the developers themselves who said, ‘I can’t get anything done. There’s too many layers of approval’.
The aim of the layoffs, therefore, was to empower the people building the product on the front lines, with managers needing to become coaches, with the ability to step in and do the development work themselves.
Bhusri said those affected were offered individual contributor roles, which would be more aligned to an AI-led company. He explained:
When you look at what these AI companies are doing, they’re heavily based on people producing real work, not necessarily managing work and AI is going to change that. So we just need to get leaner and faster and we had to make a very painful change, but that was not about AI, that was corporate bloat.