Technology
Will AI spell doom for white-collar jobs?
|
Updated on
Industry leaders are split on AI’s effect on the job market.
You may have heard stories about robots replacing blue-collar workers in the near future. While humans remain indispensable on the factory floor, these fears have now moved onto the office where artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used for white-collar tasks. With AI getting smarter every day, will it eventually deem white-collar workers obsolete, or are we getting too far ahead of ourselves?
Tech leaders predict AI-driven unemployment
The idea of AI taking away white-collar jobs made headlines in May when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI may cause global unemployment rates to reach 20% in the next one to five years especially for white-collar roles..
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Amodei said in an interview with CNN. “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.”
He also told Axios that AI could potentially eliminate half of all white-collar jobs as business leaders begin to replace humans with AI agents or similar applications en masse. He also urged governments to prepare for the mass elimination of jobs across vulnerable sectors such as IT, banking, and law.
Ironically, Amodei is spearheading the development of the very technology he warns would devastate the job market. Claude 4, Anthropic's latest chatbot, was intelligent enough to replicate “extreme blackmail behavior” when threatened to be taken offline, the company said in its report.
Other executives echoed Amodei’s sentiments. Ford CEO Jim Farley said artificial intelligence is going to replace “literally half of all white-collar workers in the US”, while Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski believes the sheer number of white-collar layoffs caused by AI would trigger a recession in the near future.
"Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective," he said.
Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy also had a blunt message to the company's 1.5 million employees: AI is going to shrink the company’s workforce in the next few years.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy said in a memo posted on the Amazon website. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs.”
The promise of agentic AI
A key technology seen as a main driver of this change is agentic AI. Unlike traditional AI systems, which rely on explicit instructions, agentic AI can execute tasks independently and adapt to new tools and systems.
In a recent Outsystems report, 93% of software executives are also planning on or are currently in the process of developing custom AI agents for their organisations. Fields like HR, in particular, stand to significantly benefit from using agentic AI in talent acquisition.
“You can focus your coaching, your onboarding, in a much more targeted way because you know exactly which skills to develop, which traits to emphasise. And it’s not only recruiting and training; you could even do the same thing for performance management,” said Bryan Hancock, a talent leader from McKinsey.
Agentic AI proponents are also quick to note that the technology is still in its experimental stages and will not replace human workers overnight.
“Many companies are starting to experiment. Typically, the environments in which they are deploying agents are very deterministic with a clear process to follow,” Hancock said.
Some leaders disagree on AI's impact
Some tech experts and industry leaders advise caution amidst the dire predictions, noting that “AI taking over jobs” is a strong marketing message for AI companies promoting their product and executives seeking to downsise their workforce.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for instance, didn’t mince words in response to Amodei’s predictions. "I pretty much disagree with almost everything he (Amodei) says," Huang said during the VivaTech 2025 conference in Paris. “Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone's — it's changed mine."
Ramine Tinati, Accenture’s AI chief, also expressed confidence that white-collar roles such as consulting will continue to flourish despite the increasing demand for AI.
To actually implement change and bring it to people, there is a lot of hand-holding and workforce changes needed to make that happen.” Tinati said during the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in Singapore. “There is also a lot of work that goes into setting a strategy that resonates and reflects your business and your industry to actually enable that change.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also doesn’t see any evidence of AI job displacement in the short term and encouraged people to “shed their fear” of the technology.
"That isn't how I see AI," Benioff said at the 2025 AI for Good Global Summit. "Maybe they have AIs I don't have. But in the AI I have, it's not going to be some huge mass layoff of white-collar workers, it is a radical augmentation of the workforce."
Where experts see hope
Other industry leaders are much more optimistic, saying that AI will create new roles and companies rather than destroy them.
"New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment," Mark Cuban wrote in a post in Bluesky, adding that significant disruptions in white collar roles were nothing new. "Someone needs to remind the CEO (Amodei) that, at one point, there were more than 2 million secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in-office dictation. They were the original white collar displacements.”
Tinati also said that AI integration has caused Accenture to speed up its recruitment rather than slow it down. “In Singapore, we’ve set up a development hub and an engineering hub, and we are hiring specifically for the roles around advanced engineering, advanced AI engineering, et cetera, so we’re hiring as much as before,” he added.
The debate over AI's impact on white-collar jobs is far from settled. While some industry leaders predict significant disruption and job displacement, others foresee a future where AI is creating new roles and improving worker productivity.
Ultimately, the future of work will likely depend on how organisations and individuals adapt to these rapidly evolving technologies. Instead of fearing obsolescence, a proactive approach that focuses on reskilling for AI and embracing the collaborative potential of AI may be the key to thriving in the workplace of the future.
Author
Loading...
Loading...