In an exclusive interview with CNBC that aired on Tuesday, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna predicted that white-collar jobs will be among the first to be affected by artificial intelligence.

According to him, generative AI and big language models have the ability to “make every enterprise process more productive.” He said this to CNBC.

“That means you can get the same work done with fewer people. That’s just the nature of productivity. I actually believe that the first set of roles that will get impacted are — what I call — back office, white-collar work,” said Krishna.

He continued by stating that “a disinflation in the demographics” was responsible for the decrease in the number of people in the working age group. “Therefore, you must increase productivity if you don’t want the quality of life to decline. And AI, I believe, is our only option.

A rush of businesses are attempting to introduce their own large-language models in response to the surge in demand for AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Long before the ChatGPT boom, IBM was a pioneer in AI, investing in and creating its own platform. IBM developed a supercomputer called Watson between 2004 and 2011. After IBM sold its personal computer division to Lenovo in 2005, that strategy went hand in hand with a shift away from computer hardware.

IBM unveiled WatsonX in May, a platform for constructing AI that enables users to create, test, and use machine learning models. It happened around 15 months after IBM sold Watson Health, its data and analytics division, after years of loss-making.

In the same month, Bloomberg reported that IBM planned to stop hiring for positions it believed AI could take over. At the time, Krishna estimated that automation and AI may replace around 7,800 people in divisions like human resources. CNBC reported in January that IBM intended to eliminate about 3,900 positions.

According to the company’s 2022 annual report, IBM and its fully owned subsidiaries have 288,300 workers working in more than 175 countries.

“So what I said was, we are not going to backfill those [white-collar] roles for the next five years. But you get digital labor or AI bots, augmenting and working alongside their fellow humans doing that work. So that is where the 7,800 [number] came from,” Krishna told CNBC’s Martin Soong.

“It’s absolutely not displacing — it’s augmenting. The more labor we got, especially if it’s not human based at all, we can create more GDP. We should all feel better about it,” said Krishna.

Krishna stated that AI will create more employment than it will eliminate in a May interview with CNBC.

Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister, stated in June that although AI may cause changes in the labour market, jobs won’t be entirely eliminated. He continued by saying that technology might potentially increase human productivity and employment growth.

In 1990, Krishna joined IBM. He became CEO in April 2020 and chairman in January 2021. Krishna stated he will concentrate on AI and hybrid cloud as essential technologies for the future in an email delivered to workers the morning he assumed the role of CEO.

Krishna frequently brought up the value of AI on the company’s second-quarter results call in July, discussing how it will boost automation, customer support, and HR, among other things. The largest division of IBM’s software business, data and artificial intelligence solutions, experienced the fastest growth throughout the quarter.

Watson’s victory over humans on “Jeopardy!” in 2011 was referenced by Krishna, who cited it as an example of how “hundreds of thousands of people and a lot of trained PhDs” were used to “create one model to do one thing.”

“With large-language models, you use a lot of data, but no labeling. So very few people to produce a map model. And now every weekend, you can create a new instance for a new task. That means your cost of a model for a task has come down by almost 100 times,” said Krishna.

“That is amazing. And that is what gives us confidence that this is the moment to go commercialize and modify.”

(Adapted from CNBC.com)

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