- Sam Altman says he is held up at night by AIS effects on the workforce
- Customer Service Agents and Programmers are most affected
- Businesses can turn job -cutting decisions
Openai CEO Sam Altman has revealed that he believes that artificial intelligence could actually be responsible for widespread job losses.
When he spoke in an interview on the Tucker Carlson show recently, Altman said he is losing sleep over Ai’s influence and noting that he feels the weight of ethical and moral responsibility as Openai’s leader.
Altman added his biggest concern is how small decisions in model behavior could have major effects in the real world, to the point that he is less concerned with greater moral decisions than he is about the daily consequences of widespread AI use.
What jobs will AI take?
In the interview, Sam Altman said customer service jobs could be most at risk for AI shift.
“I am convinced that a lot of current customer support happening over a phone or computer, these people will lose their jobs and it will be better done by an AI,” he explained.
With reference to research shared with him, Altman noticed how about 50% of the jobs change significantly every 75 years or so, but AI could speed up this, giving the workforce some time to prepare for such a change.
Looking ahead, Altman is also concerned that developers and programmers could lose their jobs to AI.
On the flip side, jobs that require stronger human connections, such as nursing, are less likely to be replaced.
However, Altman’s concerns are not baseless -Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who believes that all future generations of CEO will have to control human workers and AI agents at the same time, recently cut 4,000 human agents from the company’s support team in favor of AI efficiency gains.
However, many companies still find their feet in the AI era following the influence of larger companies like Salesforce. At that note, Gartner expects half of the companies to turn plans to shrink customer support count in 2027.
