Some of the fears surrounding widespread adoption of artificial intelligence revolve around what impact the technology will have on the global workforce.
But while most people worry about how many jobs AI will potentially take from humans and make obsolete, at least some Wall Street firms are using the technology to evaluate their employees right now.
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Wall Street banks have indicated that they want to start using AI for their annual review of employees, according to Workday (WDAY) -), the HR systems software company that started rolling out AI products in September just for this purpose.
Those products include programs that will generate job descriptions, analyze contracts, and pull from its own "rich database of insight such as performance reviews, employee feedback, contribution goals, skills, and more" to evaluate employees.
Banking companies are warming to the idea of utilizing AI in talent retention and evaluation, according to Bloomberg, with JPMorgan Chase JPM CEO Jamie Dimon recently saying the technology could allow employers to cut the work week down to 3.5 days a week in the future.
“You have 100 employees and it takes seven hours to write a job description, so 700 hours. Now it takes two minutes," Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach told Bloomberg this week.
"You can do the math, you just saved all that. So that’s a productivity gain. There’s quantifiable impact you can have through the use of AI.”
While the AI inflection point is expected to create a potentially limitless number of new jobs, it will also inevitably eliminate an untold number of jobs as well, similar to the way the digital revolution eliminated many of the jobs the industrial revolution created — about 1.7 million of them since 2000.
About 1 in 5 workers are exposed to having their jobs eliminated by AI, according to a Pew Research report based on government data, with workers with Bachelor's degrees or higher being the most exposed.
“You’re not going to need nearly as many heads if certain pieces of your code can be written 80% by AI,” Eschenbach said. “The promise of AI is to drive productivity gains. If you’re getting productivity gains out of your existing workforce, you will need less workers.”
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