According to a new report from Nikkei Asia and noted by Tweak Town, there has been about 78,557 layoffs in the tech industry so far this year. In other words, it means that between January 1 to April 1, almost 80,000 jobs were lost, while nearly half, around 37,638 of them, were losses directly linked to "AI implementation and workflow automation".
But there is is more, since 76.7% of these cuts occurred in the United States, or about 60,000 job losses of the 80,000. It's believed that a large portion of these cuts could be driven by the expectation that AI will improve productivity, rather than by actual data reflecting this. So, it would still take up to a year before companies start seeing notable productivity gains from AI.
Still it needs to be said, that a human touch is still required, as emphasised by the chief AI officer at Cognizant, Babak Hodjat.
"It turns out, you do need that last mile to make all these systems work for an enterprise. There's going to be a ton of people that are coming out of school that can't find a job and don't have the domain expertise. You have to bring them in. You have to have them learn on the job, on how to use AI within the various different domains."