LinkedIn’s Blake Lowitt, the Microsoft-owned professional networking site’s chief international affairs and legal officer, acknowledged in an interview this week at the Semaphore Global Economic Summit that his company’s data shows employment will be down about 20% starting in 2022.
But he pushed back against the idea that AI was to blame.
“LinkedIn…has an economic graph with over a billion members. It has companies, it has jobs, it has skills. It’s an amazing real-time view of what’s going on in the labor market. And we’ve been looking, because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting employment right now? We’ve looked, and to be honest, we haven’t,” he said in an interview.
Instead, the executive suggested that job losses were more closely tied to rising interest rates.
“We are not yet seeing the impact that we would like to see in the areas where everyone is talking about AI. In industries like customer support, management, marketing, all the places we think we are having an impact. [from] That’s what AI is,” Lawit continued.
“Yes, jobs are down, but they are not down any further,” he added.
Lowit also noted that the LinkedIn data does not indicate a “further decline” in employment declines for young college students entering their first jobs when compared to those mid-career or later.
Still, he didn’t rule out the possibility that things could change.
“That doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future, but it’s not happening yet.”
However, Mr. Lowit did issue some warnings in this regard. Lawit pointed out that the skills needed to do the average job have changed by 25% in recent years. With the rise of AI, LinkedIn expects this number to rise to 70% by 2030.
“So even if you’re not changing jobs, your job is changing for you,” he said.
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