The advent of generative AI tools will have a major impact on how people work, Goldman Sachs concludes. Those impacts don’t necessarily have to be negative.

Generative AI is playing an increasingly important role in our work and life, thanks in part to the efforts of OpenAI and Microsoft. So much so that some fear for their long-term job security. How justified is this fear? According to research from Goldman Sachs, there is good reason to believe that wider adoption of generative AI will have a major global impact on how people work.

Generative AI like ChatGPT is able to deliver an output that is qualitatively not far from what a human employee can do, and some tasks AI can even do better. In addition, the technology has now also become much more accessible to smaller companies that do not have the resources to develop their own artificial aids. Goldman Sachs therefore estimates that two-thirds of all current jobs worldwide will be related to some form of automation.

Artificial intelligence will eventually be able to do a quarter of the work currently done by humans. That’s 300 million jobs worldwide that will feel the impact of generative AI.

Supplement, not replace

The results are consistent with research commissioned by OpenAI. Estimates from the company behind ChatGPT are even bolder, claiming that eighty percent of all jobs will change due to the intervention of generative AI. Of course, OpenAI is quick to say that AI is there to simplify and enrich people’s jobs, not to put people out of work.

Goldman Sachs agrees with this conclusion. The study concludes that automation should open the door to new jobs in which unique human skills that a machine cannot replicate can be better exploited. Goldman Sachs therefore believes that AI will have a long-term positive impact on the global economy: global GDP will increase by seven percent over a period of ten years.

Enthusiasm trumps fear

The topic is obviously alive in the business world, because this week Salesforce also published a study. The CRM specialist measured how companies see generative AI themselves. The survey has taught us that excitement (for now?) outweighs fear.

Six out of ten employees are excited about the possibilities of AI, four out of ten are concerned. Learning to work with artificial intelligence promises to be the great challenge of the coming years.