German industrial giant Siemens has warned against eliminating entry-level jobs that are now increasingly left to artificial intelligence (AI), saying young workers could be left without essential skills, including those needed to monitor AI-generated work.
Judith Wiese, the company’s chief people and sustainability officer, said that handing certain routine tasks to AI meant that young employees would not gain hands-on experience that could benefit them later in their careers.
Wiese said it was necessary, for example, for software developers to be able to write their own code so they could critically examine the code produced by AI.
“The crucial question is always: What do I need to have done, checked and seen myself to avoid being misled by AI?” she said.
However, Wiese said AI could also help employees acquire skills more quickly, while older colleagues could learn from younger ones who had grown up using AI.
Wiese said it was still too early to say how AI would impact employment.
Noting that Siemens has some 30,000 software engineers, she said: “You can use the additional productivity either to do the same work with fewer people or to do more with the same number of employees.”
Wiese also pointed out that AI was speeding up work processes, enabling the exploration of new ideas and creating projects that would not have been possible without it.