Roles getting hit now by AI, value of AI skills, and SAP is all in

A Note From Malcolm

A decade ago Oxford professors Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne predicted that 47% of jobs in the US would be automated away by AI.  Of course, that hasn’t happened; just look at last Friday’s jobs report, with unemployment remaining around 4%.  

In our 2017 book What to do When Machines do Everything Ben Pring, Paul Roehrig and I called BS on this Oxford prediction noting that various issues - including technology maturity, good old organizational inertia and, well, math - argued against any such jobageddon. 

However, this long-watched pot of AI job automation is finally starting to boil.  Three areas, each of which represent millions of workers, are starting to get hit meaningfully:

• Software Testing and QA: LLMs are particularly good at analyzing language, including code.  Enterprise clients are onto the scent, and are demanding automated testing at dramatically lower cost.  

• Marketing Copy Editors:  Freelance employment in this sector is off 33% year to date and a similar phenomenon is starting with web designers.

• Application Maintenance: GenAI tools are proving to be particularly well-suited to monitoring and maintaining complex applications, and clients have massive economic and operational incentives to automate as much of that work as possible.  

Sure, AI will someday enable new roles (at scale). But, for now, large companies are starting to focus on automating the known jobs.  

With that lens, here are some highlights from the past week at the intersection of enterprise AI and work:How many jobs are being gained or lost due to AI? There are some clues