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AI is driving a path of destruction through the white-collar ranks of the world’s biggest companies.
And it raises an important question: How will these people find new jobs?
“I think there’ll be a lot of interesting new jobs and new areas that will need the level of human attention and talent and intelligence. However, the transition is not easy. It doesn’t happen automatically. And as a society, we have to really pay attention to how we can upskill the workforce,” Songee Yoon said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast (video above; listen in below).
Yoon is a South Korean business leader, venture capitalist, and technology strategist known for her work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, gaming, and innovation.
Early in her career, she worked at McKinsey & Company and SK Telecom, where, at age 29, she became the company’s youngest and first female executive. Yoon later joined the global gaming company NCSoft.
Over the course of 15 years, Yoon served in roles including president and chief strategy officer, helping expand the company internationally while integrating artificial intelligence into game development. In recent years, she has focused on venture capital and emerging technologies through Principal Venture Partners. Yoon is also a board member at computing giant HP (HPQ).
Yoon added that education should be reimagined as well. “Knowledge is becoming commoditized to a certain extent because we have this [new kind of] search,” she said. “We have agents at our fingertips memorizing. Just kind of having the knowledge delivered the most efficient way may not be the most important role of education. Fostering creativity is going to be more important.”
The problem for workers is only likely to worsen.
New research from Goldman Sachs economists found that job growth has slowed and turned negative in a few subindustries where AI is most ready for deployment.
Their team expects the unemployment rate to drift higher to 4.5% by year-end from its current 4.3%, in part because jobs are being replaced by AI.
Analyst group Citrini Research published a piece on how agentic AI could bring widespread economic destruction by 2028. In the imagined scenario, unemployment has doubled and the total value of the stock market has been cut by one-third.
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s Block (XYZ) just laid off 40% of its workforce, and Meta (META) is reportedly eyeing 20,000 job cuts as it seeks AI-fueled efficiencies.