I guess nobody is asking what happens IF 11.7% of the workforce is replaced. It’s like sawing the branch that you’re sitting on.
“Sure we helped destroy the economic system, nobody has money to buy our products, but hey we saved 2 million last quarter!”
companies operating in democratic countries need to realize that eventually they will hit a point where the amount of workers displaced by the technology are going to be enough to negatively impact them via the legal system.
While AI might be a helpful tool, and /could/ be cost effective in a perfect world. All that means nothing if the general public starts looking at it from a negative POV and starts voting on laws that restrict or ban it.
If big companies were smart, they would be starting to advocate for something to placebo the general working class, such as a UBI or a supplement for people that were displaced by the tech. I don't expect they will though, and eventually it'll be a lot of money wasted developing into a tech that is likely just going to be outlawed or heavily restricted.
I guess if 11.7% of your workforce is unreliable dumbasses then they could be replaced by AI
Based on my experience, yeah at least 11.7%
looks up the ladder
I just see assholes
I genuinely believe that roughly 10% of most companies are ineffective employees, whether via being a dumbass or just not caring (valid or not).
fuck, I'm seeing it happen as my own company grows from very small to medium small (a few dozen people). I swear some of my new coworkers are just AI with the way they lie to your face, you point it out, and then they immediately agree with you that yes what they said was incorrect.
Bottom of a bell curve...
Is that 11.7% part of middle management or C-suite? That's about the only aspect of any business that could be reliably replaced with AI
That's exactly what I'm thinking.
CEOs and billionaires first.
I'm hungry.
much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.
Would love to see an actual example of them being better than a person in these fields.
Oh they're great at lots of it. AI call centers? Completely unnavigable. If you wanted help, instead of customer support you should tweet at the company and hope it goes viral
AI doctors? They can deny insurance coverages at light speed. Same day rejection is the kind of "innovation" healthcare needs
AI investment advisors? They'll help you talk yourself into betting on whatever notion you think might be profitable, and tell you that's it's the smartest most clever investment idea they've ever heard
I am sure the AI companies will take care of use when they take all of our jobs.
Which specific 11% of the workforce are we comfortable being totally unaccountable and unthinking?
C-suite execs
Were they assuming it works properly when they made this study? Because it kind of... Doesn't
Honestly the only thing I see current level AI reliably doing without being used as an assistive tool is grunt info work. For example a lot of T1 customer service positions can moreorless be replaced out with the current level of LLM's that we have. Many T1 support roles consist almost entirely of searching the current customers issue, copy/pasting a boilerplate solution list of what may fix it, asking "did that work?" and if not escalating to the next tier. Hallucinations at this level won't have a very big impact outside of annoying the customer and the t2 when it gets escalated because it failed to fix the issue. Said system shouldn't have control over anything, it should strictly be information based. Anything management wise or financial wise or general output of merchandise should not be using these technologies standalone, at most it should be an assistive tool to a human in that position.
Most T1 customer service I deal with is already useless AI garbage.
Idk if I am a special case or part of the majority, but when I resort to calling a support line, it's because I have exhausted the options available to me via technology, and I need a human to take responsibility. So there has literally never been a time when a purely informational AI support bot has been useful to me.
I'm the same way here, being said, if that's the case a T1 wouldn't be useful to you anyway, as they just copy/paste the simple solutions you have likely already tried. So really no harm is done in this circumstance.
Being an assistant can make it a replacement. If 1 AI assisted worker can do the job of 1.25 not AI assisted workers you can drop 1 in every 5 workers and still complete the same amount of work (numbers made up).
Currently, one AI assisted worker can do the job of ⅘ of a non-AI assisted worker (numbers not made up: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 )
for rewording for simplicity because I read it wrong the first time. The linked article said that in their study an AI assisted developer took an average 20% longer to complete a project than the non-AI assisted dev.
This is actually quite interesting to me, granted their study pool was very small(only 16 devs), but that is an interesting data point.
Being said, this is also a different field than what I was talking about, since that moved it to development instead of T1 customer service, but the data is nice to see.
In comparison level 5 self driving would replace 30% of the workforce, and 5% of workers being unemployed is the expected normal background rate
11.7% is hardly anything
This guy's getting replaced by a chatbot because he clearly isn't in a position that requires critical thinking ability