- Sam Altman says he is kept up at night by AI’s effects on the workforce
- Customer service agents and programmers are most affected
- Companies may reverse job-cutting decisions
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed he believes artificial intelligence could indeed be responsible for widespread job losses.
Speaking in an interview on The Tucker Carlson Show recently, Altman said he loses sleep over AI’s impact, noting he feels the weight of ethical and moral responsibilities as OpenAI’s leader.
Altman added his biggest concern is how small decisions in model behavior could have large real-world effects, to the point he’s less worried about bigger moral decisions than he is about the everyday consequences of widespread AI use.
Which jobs will AI take?
In the interview, Sam Altman said customer service jobs could be most at risk of AI displacement.
“I’m confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs, and that’ll be better done by an AI,” he explained.
Citing research shared with him, Altman noted how around 50% of jobs change significantly every 75 years or so, but AI could speed this up, giving the workforce little time to prepare for such change.
Looking ahead, Altman is also worried that developers and programmers could lose their jobs to AI.
On the flip side, jobs requiring stronger human connections, like nursing, are less likely to be replaced.
Altman’s concerns aren’t baseless, though – Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who believes all future generations of CEO will need to manage human workers and AI agents simultaneously, recently cut 4,000 human agents from the company’s support team in favor of AI efficiency gains.
However, many companies are still finding their feet in the AI era, following the influence of bigger companies like Salesforce. On that note, Gartner expects half of companies to reverse plans to shrink customer support headcount by 2027.
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