A new United Nations report reassures doomsayers concerned about the impact of generative AI on the global job market.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) yesterday published its report entitled “Generative AI and Jobs: A Global Analysis of Possible Impacts on the Quantity and Quality of Jobs” on the impact of generative AI on jobs worldwide. The ILO is an organization of the United Nations and focuses on work-related matters.

A look into the future

Doomsday messages have been circulating for some time about generative AI putting many jobs at risk. Sometimes from non-obvious sources, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. However, according to the ILO report, these are exaggerated. We are already seeing some forms of automation from generative AI and yes, a modicum of tasks will be removed for humans as a result.

In many industries, automation will rarely reach 100 percent, complementing rather than replacing humans. Rather, generative AI will simplify a range of tasks and free employees to focus on more enjoyable and important tasks.

For example, a bot like GPT-4 can help with administration, data management, and customer service, but such jobs often have many more aspects that AI cannot fully handle. At the Belgian accounting and auditing company Lieutenant Guillaume, for example, as a recent conversation with our editors showed, there is no immediate concern.

Not just good news

One group that has a fairly large impact is support for office jobs: 24 percent of these are heavily impacted by generative AI and another 58 percent are moderately impacted. In high- and middle-income countries, this group is still predominantly women. Unfortunately, this means that generative AI will have an impact on the gap between men and women.

The number of office jobs usually increases with the economic growth of a country. Generative AI could prevent some of these jobs from growing in developing countries before AI takes over. In these countries, the impact of technology will generally be much less felt, with 0.4 percent of jobs at risk of being fully automated. That’s a lot lower than the 5.5 percent in richer countries.

Diploma

While the report focuses on the current situation and does not yet take into account the new jobs that will undoubtedly be created by generative AI. The researchers themselves are rather surprised by the result; They conclude that automation will transform jobs, not replace them.

However, they stress that governments must adapt their policies to the new situation in order to continue to guarantee workers’ rights. Again, especially in wealthier countries, there is a risk that governments and businesses will benefit greatly from generative AI, but workers will have to pay the price. The ILO is fighting against this anyway.