- Morgan Stanley says AI unlikely to cause mass unemployment.
- Report cites 150 years of technological job shifts.
- New roles include chief AI officers, governance specialists.
- Reskilling seen as critical for AI productivity gains.
The anxieties that artificial intelligence would eliminate millions of jobs have rattled both groups of workers and investors, however, a pan-asset research report by Morgan Stanley constituted a stabilizing factor: most workers would not be unemployed permanently and would be absorbed in new roles, many of which are not yet available.
The report squarely tackles the common worry which says that AI will eliminate many millions of jobs and cause another equal number to be unemployed and responds to it with 150 years of technological history. Morgan Stanley believes that AI could have a significantly smaller adverse effect on the labour market in the long term as compared to most people assume.
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To defend itself, the bank cited radical technological changes that have occurred during the last hundred and fifty years which include electricity, mechanised agriculture, computers and the internet. These inventions revolutionized the industries, and shifted the demand of jobs, although this did not completely eliminate the role of human labour.
The report has mentioned the spreadsheets development in 1980s and this was quite instructive. The spreadsheets ensured that some clerical work was not done, but on the flip side, they also liberated the financial professionals to do more difficult and value-added work. With time, the shift led to the emergence of new jobs within the field of finance instead of destroying the industry.
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Morgan Stanley does not think that artificial intelligence will take the same route and merely eliminate certain jobs or occupations, it will transform by altering the nature of jobs, skills needed and types of the job.
Chief AI Officer, Governance Specialist, Hybrid Engineer: The Near Future of Jobs
Since the uptake of AI is rapid, there are certain categories of new jobs that were outlined in the report. Businesses are predicted to establish the role of a chief AI officer to manage the overall process of integrating technology into the enterprise, with the number of employees in the field of AI governance expected to increase significantly, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare.
The domains of data control, cybersecurity and control over policies are likely to demand qualified employees that will ensure AI deployment in a responsible manner. Product management engineering hybrid roles would tend to increase in the technology industry.
The product managers can take on more technical roles with the support of natural-language coding tools, develop and test initial prototypes and then give the projects to the engineering teams.
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Another aspect that the bank discovered in the intersection of AI and specific industry expertise was the emerging roles. Facing consumers Companies that use AI could recruit personalisation strategists and AI supply-chain analysts with skills in both data and customer experience. Industrial companies would be able to rely more on the professionals working on predictive maintenance and smart energy solutions.
New roles in healthcare can be devoted to computational genetics and monitoring of AI-based diagnostic technologies. The case made by Morgan Stanley pushing back on investor worries that AI is destroying whole market sectors citing servicing and cyclical shares where disruption fears are at risk as only some 13 per cent of the S&P 500 in terms of market value.
It is even projected that over time, by the fourth quarter of 2025, 30 per cent of businesses that called themselves AI embracers had measurable financial or productivity gains of the technology, compared to only 16 per cent of surveyed companies the previous year and forward profit margins expectations are gaining traction among profitable adopters.
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The bank also warns, though, that one-quarter of its employees had been retrained within the last 12 months and it indicated that reskilling in large numbers will be a precondition to any positive result.
