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Let’s splash some hard data on the “AI will replace humans in the workplace” debate, shall we?
Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm, reported in its May 2023 jobs research that 3,900 jobs were lost to artificial intelligence. It’s the first time the research outlet listed artificial intelligence as a reason for job cuts.
Artificial intelligence ranked seventh among the reasons for job cuts, behind:
- Closing: 19,598
- Market/economic conditions: 14,617
- No reason provided: 12,914
- Cost-cutting: 8,392
- Voluntary severance/buyouts: 8,000
- Restructuring: 5,215
This comes a couple of months after Resume Builder, a career site for creating resumes, released a survey that found nearly half of companies using OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT say it’s replaced workers. The survey, which polled 1,000 US business leaders, found that 48% of respondents say their companies have replaced workers with ChatGPT since the OpenAI generative artificial intelligence chatbot debuted in November.
Rising Job Cuts the Norm in US
The AI-related job cut news comes amid surging numbers of workforce reductions in the US. US-based employers announced 80,089 cuts in May, a 20% increase from the 66,995 cuts announced one month prior, according to the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report. It is 287% higher than the 20,712 cuts announced in the same month in 2022, and companies so far this year have announced plans to cut 417,500 jobs, a 315% increase from the 100,694 cuts announced in the same period last year. It is the highest January-May total since 2020, when 1,414,828 cuts were recorded. With the exception of 2020, it is the highest total in the first five months of the year since 2009, when 822,282 cuts were tracked through May.
Another sign that AI is infiltrating the workplace and taking jobs: The technology sector announced the most cuts in May with 22,887, for a total of 136,831 this year, up 2,939% from the 4,503 cuts announced in the same period last year. The Tech sector has now announced the most cuts for the sector since 2001, when 168,395 cuts were announced for the entire year.
“Consumer confidence is down to a six-month low and job openings are flattening. Companies appear to be putting the brakes on hiring in anticipation of a slowdown,” Andrew Challenger, labor expert and senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., said in a statement.
Related Article: ChatGPT and Generative AI: Just Another Tool in the Creative Toolchest?
Are Marketing, Customer Experience Jobs Safe?
So as a marketer or a customer experience leader, the question becomes: How do I keep my job safe? How can I demonstrate that I can perform a task better than ChatGPT can on its own? Or how can I prove I can work with these types of tools and still support marketing campaigns, customer loyalty programs and all other marketing and CX business initiatives?
First, it’s good to know which jobs are most vulnerable to lose out to our text-producing, data-analyzing, photo-producing, creative friends in the generative AI universe.
According to Business Insider, here are the most at-risk jobs for being replaced by AI:
- Tech jobs (Coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts)
- Media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism)
- Legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants)
- Market research analysts
- Teachers
- Finance jobs (Financial analysts, personal financial advisers)
- Traders
- Graphic designers
- Accountants
- Customer service agents
Surely, there’s enough gas here to fuel the worry engine for marketers and customer experience leaders. And that’s not the only list out there of its kind.
Remember, these are predictive lists. The Challenger, Gray & Christmas data represents actual real jobs lost to AI, and 3,900 is more than a handful.
Hope for Marketers, Marketing AI Jobs
What does all this mean for the future of marketing and customer experience jobs? First, it’s far too early to tell. The hard data on marketing and CX jobs and the impact of AI is not out there yet.
Further, it’s not all doom and gloom. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its own monthly jobs report June 2 and reported the US created 339,000 jobs in May, well past Wall Street analysts estimates.
And the signs are out there companies are embracing AI and supporting workplace environments where AI can work side by side with marketers.
Here are some examples:
- Senior director of marketing, artificial intelligence. Intel last week posted a job looking for a “senior director of marketing, artificial intelligence.” It asks for “deep AI experience and the ability to collaborate effectively within large, matrixed organizations. They will be accountable for overseeing all AI marketing activities, including messaging, positioning, audience programs, demand generation, content development, social media, and sales enablement.”
- Email marketing specialist with AI expertise. Upwork last week put out a job description that included the ability to:
- Leverage AI tools, specifically ChatGPT, to create personalized and engaging email content
- Create email templates and prompts to be used with GPT
- Utilize AI for automation in your email campaigns
- AI senior product manager. Coca Cola posted a position looking for an AI senior product manager who would be a “key contributor and influential role in the Human Insights and Marketing Performance (HI+MP) global team.” Responsibilities include:
- Overseeing the development of AI-powered research tools and protocols
- Identifying user needs, defining product requirements, and managing the development process
- Developing and launching new tools and protocols products using AI technologies
Related Article: Will AI Chatbots Make Coders Obsolete?
Hope for Customer Experience Professionals, CX AI Jobs
Customer experience-related leaders also have reason for hope. For starters, Gartner released a poll last month that found 38% of respondents consider customer experience/retention as their primary focus of generative AI investments. That was No. 1, ahead of revenue growth (26%), cost optimization (17%) and business continuity (7%).
You need customer experience professionals to lead those investments and look for gains in CX, right? And while customer service made that at-risk list from Business Insider we shared earlier, there are signs companies are investing in jobs for customer experience leaders to work with AI.
For example, look at some of these titles in recent job ads:
- Customer engineer, AI/ML, Generative AI, Google Cloud. Google wants someone to work with technical sales teams as a machine learning subject matter expert to differentiate Google Cloud to customers and identify and assess customer Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine Learning (ML), or Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) opportunities to uncover cloud solutions to recommend, plan, and address core market opportunities and use cases.
- Senior AI/ML special solutions architect, AWS. This customer-facing position is designed to enable large-scale customer use cases, design ML pipelines, and drive the adoption of AWS for the AI/ML platforms. The position will provide guidance on customer engagements, and develop white papers, blogs, reference implementations, and presentations to enable customers to fully leverage AI/ML on AWS.
- Head of product, conversational AI for customer service, GotIt! This AI provider wants its head of product to establish product requirements and roadmap through engagement with customers, the executive team, sales/CX, marketing, R&D, design, and engineering teams, cross-functionally lead a diverse, global product and engineering team to ship a complex, advanced NLP product, work alongside sales and business development on strategic relationships with strategic distribution partners and coordinate and lead work streams across product, R&D, and solutions.
And let’s not forget the marketing and customer experience jobs that will be available in the growing market that is artificial intelligence. According to a new report from Extrapolate, the global retail market for artificial intelligence (which was $6.37 billion in 2022) is projected to reach a value of $48.64 billion by 2032.
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And many still remain hopeful marketing jobs will remain intact despite the light-speed developments in AI over the past half-year.
“Those working in the field of digital marketing know that the field depends on elements of imagination, creativity, and originality in finding ways to improve communication with clients,” Saurabh P. wrote in a February LinkedIn post. “In the same way, digital marketing requires a human touch. It requires storytelling and emotion which are two aspects AI isn’t able to learn in the ways required to make marketing effective today.”
