Generative AI’s impact on the future of work is the hottest topic debated since the launch of ChatGPT. Many people are worried about if their jobs will get automated and how to adapt to the AI-led changes. In this quotes collection blog, I have focused on highlighting key voices in the industry and their understanding of impact of Generative AI on jobs, how to upskill to adapt, risks of using GenAI for workforce, and more.
You can gain a perspective on how to think about impact of AI and make the most of it to your advantage.
Note: this blog will continue to get updates as and when I find new useful quotes to list. If you happen to use these quotes, it would be great if you mention our blog as the linking source as I have personally spent time going through podcasts, lectures, blogs, and videos to source them 🙂
Quotes that help understand the broad scale impact of Generative AI on jobs
“It has happened before; every technology revolution has led to loss of jobs. But new jobs get created, and there will be many new jobs created as part of this AI revolution.”
Raj Mukherjee, Executive Vice President, Indeed
“Artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning — whatever you’re doing if you don’t understand it — learn it. Because otherwise, you’re going to be a dinosaur within three years.”
Mark Cuban, Entrepreneur and Investor
As artificial intelligence evolves, we must remember that its power lies not in replacing human intelligence, but in augmenting it. The true potential of AI lies in its ability to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.
Ginni Rometty, Executive Chairman at IBM
“The last wave of tech innovation, you know, when deep learning predictive AI labeling technology started to work really well 10 years ago, it tended to be more of the routine repetitive task like factory automation that we could automate.
With generative AI, it seems to be more of the knowledge workers work that AI can now automate or augment. I think that almost all knowledge workers today can get a productivity boost by using Generative AI like right away pretty much right now.”
Andrew Ng highlights impact of GenAI on knowledge workers (in conversation with Wall Street Journal News)
“When you’re hiring people, I think in the future you’ll now hire people plus their workflows. It’s like when you hire a data analyst you hire them and their spreadsheets. That’s kind of what it is right – so, AI agents are going to, I think two years from now, we’re going to say, ‘yeah I build them like all day like I build docs and spreadsheets and I think that’s going I come with a basket of them.”
Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, in conversation with Varun Mayya
“What’s going to distinguish this next era, and if you thought this was only going to be limited to marketing and sales, I actually think you’d be wrong. It’s going to touch every single function in the Enterprise – from product building to marketing to sales to support to HR.
Every single function will have brand new AI power tools that completely change the notion of how you engage with your core constituencies – whether it’s your customers or your employees.
A new kind of Hub is going to emerge that is going to completely change every single digital tool and workflow that we know, and its core thesis will be — Shifting the Enterprise from purely being about data and automation to being about content and storytelling.
Emotional storytelling is going to be the language of the Enterprise as we go forward.”
Abhay Parasnis, Founder at Typeface, in his talk on – Reimagining the Workplace with Generative AI
“This idea of business transformation, digital transformation, business transformation. It’s a hot topic.
It’s something that a lot of consultant companies make a lot of money on. It’s something that most companies think they have to do in order to keep up. The challenge is we’re now in a cycle where things are moving exponentially.
So just doing a discrete session of business transformation isn’t enough because by the time you finish, you’re already behind again.
We’re now in an era where regeneration, constant regeneration is necessary, not just one moment of transformation.
And that changes the framework a little bit of how we go about the work we’re gonna be doing.”
Ian Beacraft, CEO Signals and Cipher at the SXSW 2024
“I keep looking around, talking to CEOs, asking, What AI are they using for these big layoffs? I think AI augments people, but I don’t know if it necessarily replaces them. The reason is because a lot of this is still built on word models. Maybe there’s a future AI model that will be more accurate, but that’s not where we are right now. This is about humans and AI working together.”
Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce [Source: Fortune]
Quotes on how to leverage Generative AI for jobs and upskill in your careers
“I believe marketing, but also every function out there that is being impacted by this productivity revolution, needs to grow a left-AI brain, grow one fast, and also identify and protect its top right-brained talent.
I mean, the function needs to strategically reskill and reorganize to embed people that can build, use and diffuse predictive AI tools in the heart of decision-making.
For marketing, (this means), building teams of marketing data scientists, marketing data engineers that build solutions that can be distributed to all marketers to, for example, unpack performance and predict outcomes.”
Jessica Apotheker, Managing Director & Partner at Boston Consulting Group at TED Talk – What Will Happen to Marketing in the Age of AI?
“Today’s dynamic technology and business landscape means every developer needs to be an AI developer.”
Juergen Mueller, CTO at SAP
Quotes on risks of using Generative AI for HR, workplace, jobs, and careers
“All the training data has been stolen. Let the content creators get paid fairly for their work. That bridge has not yet been crossed and that’s a mistake by the AI companies”
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce at World Economic Forum meet in Davos 2024
“AI will create a lot of new jobs but you won’t be able to take the current people and put them in these jobs unless governments and companies partner together on reskilling”
Julie Sweet, CEO, Accenture, at World Economic Forum meet in Davos 2024
“The way I think one has to deal with both the pace and the scale of innovation is to be very good at sampling with agility. So that means for example the guidance I give ourselves as a company is keep on the frontier and be ready for the next drop. You want to work in multiple gears. So, you’re all the time sort of looking at what’s coming and saying what is The Impossible thing that I can make possible with. What’s coming while I am then making what I built yesterday optimized for cogs, for latency, for deployment, – so that two gears you have to simultaneously work on it. I think this way, at least as a software developer, you have to sort of work in this age of AI.”
Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, in conversation with Varun Mayya on how softwares engineers can navigate their job in the age of AI.
Quotes on how to think about impact of Generative AI on workforce (solutions)
“From a business perspective, I should find it even more useful to not think about AI automating jobs, but instead AI is automating tasks.
So it turns out that most jobs you can think of as a bundle of task. And when I work with large companies will often many CEOs who come and say, hey, Andrew, I have 50,000 or 100,000 employees. What are all my people actually doing? Right? It turns out none of us really know in detail what our workforces are doing. But if you look at the jobs and break them down into task, then analyze individual tasks for potential for AI automation or augmentation often leads to interesting opportunities to use AI.”
Andrew Ng on how to think about AI’s impact on jobs in conversation with Wall Street Journal News
“Our research says that 50% of the activities that we pay people to do can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. We think it’ll take decades, but it will happen. So there is a role for business leaders to try to understand how to redeploy talent. It’s important to think about mass redeployment instead of mass unemployment. That’s the right problem to solve.”
Michael Chiu, Partner, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI)
“The countries with the highest robot density have among the lowest unemployment rates. Technology and humans combined in the right way will drive prosperity.”
Ulrich Spiesshofer, ex-CEO, ABB Ltd.
“All too often, as we talk about AI and generative AI, we jump to the conclusion of job loss. One of the findings from our report is that it’s much more a story of augmentation. . . . how can we help augment professions and help free up time so that it can then be repurposed?”
Saurabh Sanghvi, Partner at McKinsey, Source: Podcast: Generative AI: How will it affect future jobs and workflows?
What we’re starting to see is this question of – What is valuable work?
What is the valuable work that your people do?
How do you make sure that you’re getting maximum leverage of the insights and talent that you bring together?
And one of the most dangerous questions I think we’re going to have to ask ourselves in the next few years is – How many people do we really need inside our organisations?
Mike Walsh, Media Commentator and Trend Analyst, Source: Generative AI and the Future of Work
“When we think about this technology, we need to put human dignity, human well-being—human jobs—in the center of consideration. That’s the second part of human-centered AI.”
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford University, Source: McKinsey
Check out other AI quotes collection across industries
I have (and will continue to ) create a series of blog posts which go further into Generative AI quotes across industry applications. Here are some to check out:
- 30+ Insightful Generative AI quotes 2024 by Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Yuval Noah Harari, and more
- 15+ insightful quotes on AI Agents and AGI from AI experts and leaders
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