An American tech corporation decided it would pause hiring for roles it believes could be replaced with Artificial Intelligence.

International Business Machines Corp. CEO Arvind Krishna said that his company will attempt to suspend or slow down hiring operations in back-office functions, such as human resources, as he could “easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”

This means that around 7,800 jobs in the company will be lost. IBM currently employs about 260,000 workers and continues to hire people for software development and customer-facing roles.

Finding talent is easier today than a year ago, Krishna said.

He explained that some mundane HR tasks will be automated such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments. However, he added that other HR tasks such as evaluating workforce composition and productivity, will most likely not be replaced over the next decade.

Since the recent rise of AI with the release of ChatGPT, tech CEOs have attempted to make use of a tool that came during a turbulent economic period with many companies preferring to resort to AI with some jobs if it means saving some cash.

IBM is not the first company to attempt such a thing. Other big corporations such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have done the same.

- Meta -

In March, Mark Zuckerberg said his “single largest investment is in advancing AI” while building it into all of its products. He also said 5,000 open roles not yet hired for would be closed.

He had added that his company is interested in investing in AI tools that would “automate workloads over time, or identifying obsolete processes that we can phase out.”

- Amazon -

The company’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said that Amazon is “adding more dollars for large language models and generative AI” while also "spending less year-over-year" on transportation and core fulfillment.

This comes after the company had already announced layoffs that will affect 27,000 workers and is currently attempting to use AI to fill some of the gaps.

- Microsoft -

In 2020, Microsoft replaced some workers who were overseeing news homepages it managed with robots.

Now, the company has announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI's large language model, and according to a Bloomberg report, Microsoft's salespeople will use AI from OpenAI in a key customer-relationship app to assist them with time-consuming tasks.