A company laid off 7,800 employees to replace them with AI, but it was not expected that many employees would be hired again due to AI

IBM laid off thousands of employees in 2023. Now the head of IBM explains: Through the layoffs, new jobs have been created in the fields of programming and sales.

IBM (short for International Business Machines Corporation) is a US IT and consulting company. In 2023, many companies laid off their employees to replace them with artificial intelligence. This included according to IGN.com the company IBM, which laid off 7,800 employees in January 2023.

Layoff of thousands of employees led to the creation of new jobs

What lies behind the layoffs? The company’s strategy was to impose a hiring freeze and to automate its areas through artificial intelligence. IBM itself stated that it would fill positions with AI and indicated that at least 30 percent of the workforce would be replaceable.

However, IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna stated in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal (possibly paywall) that while thousands of employees were replaced by AI, new jobs in programming and sales had been created:

While we have done an enormous amount of work within IBM to leverage AI and automation in certain business processes, our overall employment has actually increased because it allows us to invest in other areas.

The areas (software development, sales, and marketing) where people have been newly hired are referred to by Krishna as areas where “critical thinking” is at the forefront and where employees must do things that “measure up to or against other people, rather than just performing memorized processes.”

For the individuals who were laid off by IBM in 2023, Arvind Krishna’s suggestion that their layoffs led to new jobs may be little solace.

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