A Harvard Professor Says This Is How AI Will Shake Up White-Collar Work

Last week, a report from Microsoft — one of the companies most aggressively pushing AI tools out into the world — suggested the top 40 jobs AI will most likely take over in the coming years, as well as the 40 jobs most resistant to the AI invasion. You probably won’t be surprised that telemarketers and translators are at high risk, while more practical roles like nursing assistants and embalmers are at low risk. But in a new report, Christopher Stanton, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, explained how quickly AI might upset many more white-collar jobs than some people think, and he also worries that there may not be much we can do to stop it. Stanton’s research covers the impact of AI in the workplace, so he knows what he’s talking about, and some of the statistics and opinions he voiced should concern pretty much every leader of any size company. When you look at “the tasks workers in white-collar work can do and what we think AI is capable of,” he explained to The Harvard Gazette, the “overlap impacts about 35 percent of the tasks that we see in labor market data.” Essentially, Stanton thinks that the suite of AI tools that’s already accessible to businesses could replace a human worker in about one in every three tasks typical in the office. Whether companies actually are choosing to do that is an open question, however. Stanton also set out an optimistic case for AI replacing human workers, using his own job as professor as a model. Optimistically, he thinks companies may choose to use AI to automate some jobs and thus “free up people to concentrate on different aspects of a job.” As a professor, you might see “20 percent or 30 percent of the tasks that a professor could do being done by AI, but the other 80 percent or 70 percent are things that might be complementary to what an AI might produce,” he said. Here his words echo numerous other AI proponents’ promises about AI. But when it comes to keeping AI evolution on track — and the expansion of AI has been “probably some of the fastest-diffusing technology around,” Stanton said — this expert has a darker idea. While he admits the jury is still out on whether AI will displace people from whole classes of jobs or not, he does worry that it might upset the entire job market, with many middle-class Americans suddenly out of work, leading to impacts on society. Stanton said he felt politicians “will have a very limited ability to do anything here unless it’s through subsidies or tax policy,” because “anything that you would do to prop up employment, you’ll see a competitor who is more nimble and with a lower cost who doesn’t have that same legacy labor stack probably outcompete people dynamically.” Stanton’s words resonate strongly with the ongoing mainstream debate about the impact of AI, and in particular with actions by Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy. In a memo to staff recently, Jassy gave a leadership master class about how not to talk about AI, bungling the news that AI would indeed be taking people’s jobs at the retail and internet giant so badly that it triggered emotional staff pushback on Amazon’s internal Slack discussion system, with some workers demanding senior leadership positions should also be under the same AI threat. But last week Jassy took a different tone when he addressed the matter during Amazon’s earnings call, Fortune reported. After reiterating that AI is going to “change very substantially the way we work,” he softened his stance and instead suggested that AI will “make all our teammates’ jobs more enjoyable” since it’ll free them from many “rote” procedures that couldn’t previously be automated. Saying AI will make jobs more “enjoyable” is an interesting turn of phrase, and it does echo recent research by global tech giant HP. The company’s study found seven in 10 workers who use AI say it can make their jobs easier, which may correlate with lower stress and also boosted happiness (which translates to better productivity). But there’s a strong undercurrent to all this research. Stanton, Jassy, and other experts argue that AI will take people’s jobs away … but for the remaining staff, it may make their days smoother. Why should you care about this? If you’re busy planning out how your company will leverage AI tech, the way you explain the initiative to your workers matters. Honest words about helping their daily tasks, and a promise not to overburden them with more work now that they’re benefiting from AI assistance is probably a good idea. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON