As U.S. companies invest in artificial intelligence-related skills, they tend to attract more educated younger employees while reducing middle management and senior roles, according to a new study.
In other words, AI flattens the organization while increasing the advanced degrees of staff.
In a paper titled “Steady Investments in Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Changing Workforce Composition,” academics Tania Babina (Columbia Business School), Anastasia Fedik (University of California, Berkeley), and Alex Hee (University of Maryland Business School), authored by James. Hodson (AI for Good) describes the analysis of employee resume and job posting datasets with the goal of evaluating the impact of company commitments on AI-related skills.
“We found that companies that invest more in AI tend to place more emphasis on STEM degrees and a more educated workforce,” the authors of the paper said. “At the same time, AI-invested companies are seeing less weight at the top in terms of their organizational structures, a higher proportion of younger employees, and a de-emphasis on the role of middle and senior management.”
AI-invested companies will no longer be top heavyweights, with more young workers and less focus on middle management
AI investment in this case refers to related terms such as “artificial intelligence,” “computer vision,” “machine learning,” “natural language processing,” and numerous other software applications related to these activities. Inferred from job information.
Officials argue that AI investments will change the composition and management structure of companies, shifting organizations to less experienced and more educated employees at the expense of middle- and senior-level leaders.
“Specifically, a one standard deviation change in the share of AI employees in a company would increase the share of young employees by 1.6 percentage points from 2010 to 2018, compared with 0.8 percentage points for middle management and 0.7 percentage points for senior management. % decrease,” said the paper.
In terms of educational attainment, a one standard deviation change in the proportion of AI workers leads to a 3.7 percent increase in workers with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, a 2.9 percent increase in workers with a master’s degree, and a 2.9 percent increase in workers with a doctorate degree. 0.6 percent increase in workers getting
Those without a college education saw a 7.2% decline in employment at AI-oriented organizations.
It is based on Cognism’s Employment Profiles (resumes) dataset covering 535 million people worldwide and cross-referenced with the names of listed companies in the Compustat dataset. It is also based on a data set covering more than 180 million of his nationwide job listings provided by Burning Glass Technologies. United States in 2007 and 2010-2018. Wage and education data from the US Census of America Census (ACS) and the Census Quarterly Workforce Index (QWI) were also considered.
The researchers specifically excluded companies in the technology sector from the various industries evaluated, as they are more likely to be producers of AI tools.
Coincidentally, however, a trend toward flatter organizations has emerged in connection with recent headcount reductions at Meta, one of the leading AI developers at the moment. In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:[O]In the coming months, organizational leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening the organization, discontinuing low-priority projects, and reducing adoption rates. “
The researchers found that the trend for AI-enthusiastic firms to become less top-heavy is similar to the impact of IT adoption, but that communication technologies reduce autonomy and increase centralization, as described in a 2014 paper. It is pointed out that it is contrary to the influence of
In a 2021 paper, “AI and Jobs: Evidence from Online Jobs,” we examined Burning Glass job postings data to assess how the transition of AI to jobs would affect wages. However, officials (Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Jonathon Hazel, and Pascual Restrepo) found that there was a significant difference between exposure to AI and job and wage growth at the occupational or industry level. has no discernible relationship.”
They concluded that AI is being used to handle certain tasks previously performed by humans, but that the impact on wages has yet to be shown. Nonetheless, it seems likely that hiring more junior employees and reducing middle and senior management positions will have an impact on companies’ pay obligations at some point.
Latest employee composition document by Babina other AI’s predictive power allows employees to make better decisions with less supervisory oversight, suggesting that it differs from previous automations that completely took over routine tasks. I’m here.
“Investments in AI have not been associated with a decline in the demand for highly skilled workers performing predictive tasks, but rather with an increase in the share of highly skilled workers at the firm level. There are,” the authors observe.
For less skilled workers, the opportunities are less promising. ®
