HP CEO says A.I. will change career trajectories: ‘From doing things to interpreting things’

“I think it’s going to change significantly where people spend time,” Lores told Yahoo Finance on Friday. “Many activities that today take one day to get done are going to take seconds. And it’s going to be really shifting the world from doing things to interpreting things, to really working with the output.” 

There’s little doubt that A.I. will increase the amount of work that a single employee can do in a day. That raises the question, of course, of whether companies will need as many workers as they now employ.

Goldman Sachs estimated in March that while A.I. might lead to new jobs and a productivity boom, it could also expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation.

Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, ran an experiment a few months ago to see what A.I. tools could accomplish when given a business project and 30 minutes. He described the results as “superhuman,” adding he would have needed a team and “maybe days of work” to accomplish the same thing.

A.I. will have “a big impact in the type of activities that we will maintain within the company,” Lores said. “Those activities that we think A.I. robots will be more efficient at doing. And this really will also have a positive impact on the company from a cost structure perspective.”

Other CEOs are also looking at which activities might be shifted from employees to A.I tools. 

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna recently told Bloomberg that his company would slow or suspend hiring in non-customer-facing roles, adding, “I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by A.I. and automation over a five-year period.” He told Japan’s Nikkei last week that given population declines in many developed economies, having people do routine tasks that A.I. could do is “not an option,” adding, “We are going to need technology to do some of the mundane work so that people can do higher-value work.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company’s market value soared last week thanks to A.I.-fueled demand for its computer chips, urged National Taiwan University graduates during a commencement speech last weekend to “take advantage of A.I. and do amazing things with an A.I. copilot by your side” He added that while many people fret about losing their job to A.I., they might actually lose it to someone who’s more expert at using A.I. than they are. 

“I think we all will have to learn the new technology,” Lores said. “We’ll have to be proficient at it because this will be the only way to continue to add value and to create value.”

Even someone in his own position, he added, will “have to learn.”