CEOs are betting AI will augment work rather than displace all workers

The effect artificial intelligence will have on the labor market has left workers and job seekers alike worried about their future. Top executives, however, are optimistic that the technology can continue to augment workloads rather than entirely displace human employees.

The debate over the future of work even extends inside the corridors of a major AI provider.

Speaking Monday at the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington, D.C., Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark dismissed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s argument that AI could drive the unemployment rate as high as 20% in the next five years.

Clark has previously said that accepting such high joblessness is almost a policy “choice,” given that any potential collapse in the job market would take time to play out and is a challenge that can be met by society.

“I think that the aspect of this, which is a choice is, if we’re correct, this technology really is going to change the world in a vast way,” Clark said on stage at the conference. “It will change how business is done, … aspects of national security, how we even relate to one another as people. And it’s impossible to reconcile that with a world where the economy doesn’t change in substantial ways as well.”

Disruption fears

Anthropic has been at the center of AI disruption fears in the stock market, resulting in a bloodbath for software companies, which investors suddenly see as vulnerable to technological obsolescence in a world moving toward agentic systems that take actions with minimal human oversight. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) is in a bear market, after plunging more than 30% from its high last September.

Those changes will force a reworking in how employees meet the labor market, with Clark noting that he sees some weakness in early graduate employment in some industries. Clark leads The Anthropic Institute, a 30-person think tank studying AI’s effects on the workplace.

Clark said college students entering the job market today have to understand how to analyze and connect information across many disparate disciplines. He is less enthusiastic about students building what he called rote programming skills.

“What AI allows us to do is it allows you to have access to sort of an arbitrary amount of subject matter experts in different domains,” Clark said. “But the really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting if you collided different insights from many different disciplines.”

Here is how some of the other Semafor panelists are thinking through the implications of AI in business:

Jon Clifton, CEO of Gallup, said the countries most likely to have an edge in the future are the ones with a larger portion of the workforce using AI. “We can see that 50% of all of American employees are using AI. But one of the challenges was … are you seeing the productivity gains? It’s not being used a lot. So interestingly enough, only 13% of employees are actually using it on a daily basis,” he said.

Daniel Herscovici, president and CEO of Plume, outlined the importance of having a dedicated leader outlining a company’s AI strategy: “We have an AI czar … she’s amazing, and she’s dictated our strategy moving forward. So I think that assigning somebody whose job is to wake up every day and [address] how to implement the infrastructure is quite important.”

Asked if he is working less after implementing AI more into his day, Herscovici said, “absolutely not,” adding that, “I am getting more done in my eight or nine or 12 hour day, that’s for sure.”

Salil Parekh, managing director and CEO of Infosys, said he’s focused on ensuring his workers learn new skills using AI: “The approach we’ve chosen is to re-skill all our 300,000 employees on AI tools,” he said. “So first we do a lot of work, where, in the first few months of training, we encourage the sort of recent graduate to not use any AI tools and learn how software development is done. And then bring in, after two or three months, the usage of tools and see how things are enhanced.”