Illustration of the English acronym AI for artificial intelligence placed on a computer motherboard. Photo courtesy of Reuters.

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) is already becoming a reality, threatening people's jobs in the information technology (IT) field.

According to CNN on July 4, an increasing number of IT companies are laying off employees, citing the introduction of AI as the reason. In June, California educational technology company Chegg announced that it had laid off 4% of its employees 'to create a better situation in response to the company's AI strategy and to generate long-term sustainable value for students and investors.'

File storage and sharing service company Dropbox also cited AI as the reason for laying off 16% of its employees at the end of April. In May, job placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas laid off 3,900 IT sector employees, also citing the impact of AI.

The situation is no different for large IT companies. In a May interview with Bloomberg, Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, stated that he expects to stop employing jobs that could be replaced by AI within the next few years. Following the significant ripple effect of this statement, he clarified that 'AI will create more jobs than it takes away.'

Goldman Sachs predicted in March that AI could replace a quarter of current human jobs and affect the employment of 300 million full-time workers.

The mass layoffs brought on by the advent of generative AI like GPT (ChatGPT) last November are proceeding in tandem with the uncertain situation following the decrease in demand for digital services post-COVID-19 pandemic.

According to data from the website Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job data in the IT industry, the number of people laid off from IT companies so far this year has already reached 212,294, surpassing last year's annual total of 164,709 in just half a year.

In contrast, plans for expanded investment in AI are being disclosed one after another. In January, Microsoft announced plans to lay off 10,000 employees to cut costs, and then revealed a multi-billion dollar investment plan in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, just a few days later. In March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced plans to lay off 10,000 employees and expand investment in AI in a letter to employees.

As a result, software engineers, who once received top treatment in Silicon Valley, are now being overshadowed by AI experts in terms of salary and treatment. Silicon Valley, which has played a pioneering role in the development of AI, is now providing a case study on how the composition of a company's workforce changes after the introduction of this technology.

Roger Lee, founder of Layoffs.fyi, said, 'The salaries of senior software engineers with expertise in AI or machine learning are on average 12% higher than their colleagues in other areas of software engineering.' He called this gap the 'AI premium.'

Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, said, 'You don't need to become an AI expert, but you should know how to effectively incorporate AI into what you do.' He added, 'The competitive environment for talent is really changing.'

Reporter Alexander Lee alexanderlee_24@newsyn.co.kr