AI Investments Boost Junior Roles and Reduce Middle-Management in US Companies

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US corporations, it seems, have a new favourite pastime: betting big on artificial intelligence, only to find themselves hosting a congregation of brainy upstarts, while the old guard in the corner office gets shown the door.

That’s right, in their pursuit of all things AI, US firms are experiencing a noticeable shift in workforce composition, with an influx of employees armed with advanced degrees, and a simultaneous disappearance of the once-indispensable middle-management and senior roles. This is what you get when you invite artificial intelligence to the party – it brings along its entourage of tech-savvy, STEM-educated youngsters, while kicking out the seasoned veterans who used to call the shots.

This fascinating revelation comes from a research paper intriguingly titled “Firm Investments in Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Changes in Workforce Composition.” The authors of the study – Tania Babina from Columbia Business School, Anastassia Fedyk from the University of California at Berkeley, Alex He from the University of Maryland Business School, and James Hodson from AI for Good – have been playing detective with data sets of job postings and worker resumes. They’ve been trying to find out what happens when businesses decide to get serious about AI.

What they found is quite telling. AI investment has a way of turning a company’s employee structure on its head. The firms that splash the cash on AI find themselves nurturing a growing brood of junior employees, while their senior ranks start to thin out. In the world of AI, it’s out with the old and in with the educated.

So, how do you tell if a company is on the AI bandwagon? Keep an eye out for job postings that mention terms like “artificial intelligence,” “computer vision,” “machine learning,” “natural language processing,” and a host of other AI-related software applications. If you see these terms popping up, it’s a good bet that the company is in the midst of an AI-induced facelift.

As the researchers suggest, AI investment doesn’t just alter the skillset within a firm. It also shakes up the management structure, placing the reins in the hands of those with fewer years under their belt but more letters after their names. Specifically, a one-standard deviation change in the share of AI workers at a firm has been found to precipitate these seismic shifts.

Isn’t it time we all took a hard look at what the AI revolution really means for our workplaces? I think so.

Source: www.theregister.com