IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that around 30 percent of non-customer-facing job positions could be taken over by AI within five years.

International Business Machines (IBM) plans to take a break from hiring for office roles that could potentially be automated by AI. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna explained in an interview with Bloomberg that many back-office positions, such as human resources and accounting departments, will be the first to be managed by artificial intelligence.

Krishna: Artificial Intelligence Can Replace Employees

According to LinkedIn, IBM employs 282,000 people worldwide, and according to Bloomberg, about 26,000 staff do not have one-on-one contact with customers. This means that about 7,800 people can be replaced by artificial intelligence.

Making a statement on the subject, Krishna said: “I can easily say that this technology will replace 30 percent of the employees in five years.” However, Krishna thinks that the roles that assess workforce composition, measure productivity, and perform other tasks that leverage human judgment cannot be changed over the next decade.

Many industry experts are at a crossroads over whether emerging technology has the potential to put people out of work on a massive scale.

A recent study revealed that 62 percent of Americans think the application of AI in the workplace will have a major impact on employees in the next 20 years. The research report underlined that many employees are also very worried about their future.

Tech-savvy employees, on the other hand, feel a little more secure about their future.

Blockchain developer Salman Arshad, who shared his views on the subject, said that this technology will only serve as a tool to increase efficiency, rather than destroy the developer market.

On the other hand, Dominik Schiener, the founder of the IOTA Foundation, believes that this technology will take employment opportunities away from people, but at the same time, this robotic process will create new jobs.