Students in their final year of university could be forgiven for feeling particularly downhearted. Having had their schooldays blighted by Covid, their entry into the job market will now be disrupted by AI, or so they keep being told. Every week brings another gloomy story heralding the graduate jobs apocalypse.
As so often, the reality is more nuanced. There is a slowdown in job openings for new graduates but this is in line with the general fall in recruitment — not that this is any comfort to hard-working youngsters job-hunting in a challenging market. Current data doesn’t, in fact, show a significant AI effect overall.
However, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: change is coming. By the time my two teenagers start work, not only will the jobs available to them be very different to those on offer today, but the whole nature of work will have changed, too.
I have been really struck by a recent paper, ‘Canaries in the Coal Mine’, from the Stanford economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chanda and Ruyu Chen. Based on payroll data, this found that 22 to 25-year-olds in the US are already experiencing declining employment in AI-exposed professions such as software development and customer services.
Students are adjusting to this new reality; the numbers doing computer science as their major at Princeton University in New Jersey are down by a quarter on two years ago.
Now, ironically, the reason that jobs in coding have been hit so hard by artificial intelligence is that coders have led the development of this technology. And AI now means that non-coders can do much of what coders used to do; there’s a reason why “vibe coding” is the phrase of the year.
As people with expertise in other sectors are brought into AI development, this effect will begin to be replicated in fields from finance to sales and marketing to healthcare. Tellingly, OpenAI has already recruited 100 bankers as it tries to work out how to use its models to automate a slew of financial services jobs.
So, we should not think that this phenomenon will be limited to coding. When I speak to chief executives, it is striking how confident they are that they can grow their businesses without hiring more people, because of what AI makes possible. For them, “flat is the new up” when it comes to headcount.
But this does not mean that we humans are about to be replaced — that the singularity has arrived, or whatever other science-fiction fantasy is currently all the rage in Silicon Valley. Indeed, it is interesting that the demand among employers for people skills has actually increased in the past few years. AI can do many things, but it will never be able to recreate the interpersonal skills that are so valuable in building relationships and creating the kind of culture that enables a business to succeed.
History teaches us that while general-purpose technologies such as AI destroy some jobs, they create others. Look at how AI engineer was the fastest-growing job in both the UK and the US last year, and how the data centre boom is creating huge demand for welders and electricians.
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Remember that 60 per cent of today’s job types did not even exist in 1940. Many of the children starting secondary school this year will do jobs that we cannot envisage today.
The labour market five years from now will look very different to how it does today. Companies, leaders and institutions will have to work out how people will start their professional journeys given that many of the entry-level tasks assigned to new recruits are the easiest for AI to do.
So my message is: don’t let panic about AI killing jobs paralyse us. Let’s embrace it now and tool up our people for future success.
Rather than sticking our fingers in our ears, we should be showing people how to prepare. If 70 per cent of jobs will require different skills by 2030, we need to start readying our workforce for this now. I worry that we are lagging behind in this effort — that we have not grasped the urgency of this challenge. This is not about curriculum changes in 2028, but action this day.
If we don’t respond to this moment, we risk being left behind. The economic benefits of AI will flow to those countries that are quicker to adopt it — and if we don’t give people the skills to use it, then they won’t. The result: Britain will lose out in this race. The consequence: living standards here will fall and we will become a poorer country.
So, if we want to surf this wave, not be drowned by it, we need a mindset shift. As the saying has it, you are not going to lose your job to artificial intelligence, but to someone using it. We have to build a workforce in this country that is AI-competent.
The number of job ads requiring AI literacy is already up 70 per cent year on year, according to LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft where I am a senior adviser. We need to equip not just our children but ourselves with these vital new skills, which will allow us to get the most out of AI.
Success in this new era won’t just come from being able to use AI tools, but also from understanding how it has changed the nature of work. Soon, from the graduate trainee to the executive with 20 years of experience, we will all be managing a team — albeit of AI agents. We need to prepare for that, to work out how they can help us to be as productive as possible.
At the same time, it will never have been easier to set up your own business. Turning an idea into a product and bringing it to market will be radically simpler than before.
Change is coming to the world of work. The only question is whether we adjust to it, or get crushed by it.
The Sunday Times supports the Richmond Project (richmondproject.org) and the work it undertakes. Rishi Sunak has donated the fee for this column to it