Artificial intelligence will lead to mass unemployment or create more jobs, depending on who you ask. So which view is right? Few people have better insight into this question than Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products.
Belsky has seen first-hand how graphic designers are adopting recently introduced AI features in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator that save them huge amounts of time—and heard questions from companies about whether such tools mean there’s less need to hire more creative talent given the increased efficiency made possible.
“I’ve been involved with a lot of these conversations with companies,” Belsky said in a Wednesday episode of the Big Technology podcast. “I always explain, first of all, engineers have gotten more productive over the last few decades, and guess what happens? People keep hiring more engineers. Why? Because they get more ingenuity per person, and they want more people because they wanna do more things.”
Graphic designers are also becoming more productive, thanks to AI. Belsky described how Adobe took an idea from its Illustrator for iPad app (“not a hugely popular product”), the contextual task bar, and applied it to Photoshop. “That one innovation changed everything for us in Photoshop,” he said. The bar gives designers options to use generative AI capabilities based on where they are in the workflow. It might indicate that Generative Expand is available, for instance, allowing empty space around an image to be filled “with newly generated content that naturally blends with the existing image,” as Adobe’s website describes it.
The adoption of such tools is higher than “probably any other feature” Adobe introduced in the past decade, Belsky said.
“I’ve never met a creative professional that wants to take two hours to do something that they could achieve in two minutes or two seconds,” he said. “No one wants to do things the long way. The question is what are they going to do with a lot of their new-found time.”
Some CEOs react with paranoia to how employees might use that new-found time. But with designers, Belsky said: “When you give them that time back, you know what they’re going to do instead? They’re gonna run more A/B tests of different images as opposed to resizing the same images. They’re gonna start to explore different possibilities and propose maybe better solutions.”
In a similar way, companies themselves will start to expand and branch out as they become more efficient thanks to new AI capabilities, Belsky believes.
“Unless you’re a penny-pinching, private-equity-owned company, you are probably a company that actually wants to build more products, more features, more marketing campaigns across more platforms and more regions with more testing,” he said.
As companies “get more out of each person on average,” he said, they want to hire more people “because you end up wanting to do more things to grow your business.” That desire, he said, might be a “natural human tendency of capitalism, if not just humanity overall.”
Belsky is not alone in this view. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—whose company’s shares have jumped more than 240% this year thanks to booming demand for its AI chips—shared his own upbeat outlook about AI in an interview with the Acquired podcast a few months ago.
“My sense is that it’s likely to generate jobs,” Huang said. “The first thing that happens with productivity is prosperity. When companies get more successful, they hire more people, because they want to expand into more areas.”
A common line of thinking, he noted, is that if a company improves productivity with AI, then it will employ fewer people. But that assumes a company will have no new ideas, and “that’s not true for most companies.”
For a darker view, look no further than Elon Musk. At a recent AI summit in Britain, the Tesla CEO told Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that AI is the “most disruptive force in human history” and that “there will come a point where no job is needed…One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.”
As Belsky sees it, AI will not only lead to more ingenuity per person, but also far greater opportunities for smaller companies to compete against bigger ones.
“I’m particularly bullish for small companies,” he said, because they’ll start to gain the advantages of big corporations without having “to become bulky.” AI will give small companies for instance the power of data analysis—usually enjoyed by bigger companies—as well as better capabilities in marketing and content creation as AI handles more of these functions.
“You’re going to see many, many more smaller companies have great businesses as a result of this technology,” he said.
