41% of employers worldwide say they will cut staff by 2030. because of AI

The World Economic Forum has released its biannual survey of how employers around the world expect their businesses to look in the future, and much of the focus is on generative AI. And while the majority (77%) expect to help train their existing staff to work with AI, 41% say they expect to reduce the number of staff they hire as AI automates more tasks at work.

The survey included 1,000 employers worldwide, covering more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to new report. One of the big issues that comes out of the survey is that employers believe that many of their workers don’t have the skills they need to do their jobs as technology advances.

“AI and big data topped the list of fastest-growing skills, closely followed by networking and cybersecurity, and technology literacy,” according to the report. “In addition to these technology-related skills, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, along with curiosity and lifelong learning, are expected to continue to grow in importance over the period 2025-2030.”

The report appears to be very bad news for graphic designers and legal secretaries, two jobs that employers will apparently need less of in the future, possibly due to AI.

“The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining jobs, a first-time forecast not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate the growing capacity of GenAI to perform knowledge work,” the report states.

Generative AI tools are now capable of creating complex graphics with just a few textual instructions, although the technology is controversial for being little more than a plagiarism machine.

“Job declines in both roles are seen as being driven by both AI and information processing technologies, as well as expanding digital access. This is a big change from the 2023 edition of the report, when graphic designers were considered a moderate-growth occupation and legal secretaries did not appear on the list of expected job growth/decline,” the report continues.

Employers say they believe attracting employees will include an emphasis on health and wellness, a fairly nebulous category to begin with, but certainly a sentiment many in the U.S. can relate to given our fundamentally broken health care system. The US is the only rich country in the world that has not achieved universal health coverage, and the availability of health insurance is largely tied to the availability of work.

The good news? The study predicts net growth in the number of jobs created over the next five years, even with AI advances.

“Extrapolating from the predictions shared by respondents to the Future of Jobs survey about current trends in the period 2025-2030, job creation and destruction due to the structural transformation of the labor market will reach 22% of today’s total jobs “, the report states.

“This is expected to lead to the creation of new jobs equivalent to 14% of today’s total employment, amounting to 170 million jobs,” the report continued. “However, this growth is expected to be offset by the displacement of the equivalent of 8% (or 92 million) of current jobs, resulting in a net growth of 7% of total employment, or 78 million jobs.”

The report highlights that while technology is expected to help productivity around the world, people who use this technology are expected to be more productive.

“Importantly, this analysis only compares proportions from 2025. and 2030 of total task performance attributable to human employees, technology, or the collaboration between the two, respectively, and does not take into account the potential change in the absolute amount of work tasks completed (outcome),” the report states.

“In other words, both machines and people may be significantly more productive in 2030.” – performing more or more valuable tasks in the same or less time than it would take them to do so in 2025. – so any concern about people running out of things to do” due to automation would be misplaced.”

This is of course little consolation for graphic designers. But hopefully this will prove true for other professions, especially since AI has proven to be incredibly dumb and needs a lot of babysitters to make sure it doesn’t screw up a lot of tasks.