What keeps the CEO of multi-billion dollar company Wix up at night? The future of the workforce.
“I’m really worried about the job market,” Abishai Abrahami told Business Insider.
The CEO said advances in AI will reduce “a ton” of roles. He predicted that approximately 70% of the current top 20 most popular jobs in the United States will be affected by AI in the next five to 10 years.
Abrahami said he is concerned about computers outsmarting humans, a concept often referred to as artificial general intelligence, but some technology leaders say humans have already surpassed it in some ways. In that reality, humans would “become monkeys,” the CEO said. Growing up, he said, reaching such a state “was the stuff of science fiction,” but now it’s becoming a reality.
Abrahami said he doesn’t know whether that future is next week or 10 years from now, but he said it’s closer than 15 or 20 years from now.
But AI will also create new opportunities and jobs, Abrahami said. For example, Wix just introduced a new role called xEngineer. xEngineers are described as design-first engineers with deep domain expertise who use AI as an integral part of every workflow. The company said in an announcement that the position is for a specialist who will be “amplified” by AI.
Abrahami said some jobs are more at risk. More than others:
most likely to be affected in the near future
Abrahami said one of the most common jobs in the U.S. — ride-hailing app drivers, taxi and truck drivers — would be affected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that more than 4 million of these jobs will be created in 2024.
Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo has already launched self-driving services in several cities across the U.S., and Tesla just started offering robotaxi rides without human supervision in Austin, where it has been offering its service for several months.
The CEO said people working in customer service and call center jobs would also be affected. Other technology leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have similarly said that AI will first take away customer service jobs.
Other jobs, such as software developers and analysts, are already reshaping their jobs with AI. a Google Cloud Reports released in September We found that AI adoption among software professionals has skyrocketed to 90%.
least likely to be affected in the near future
The CEO predicted that jobs that require human performance and interaction will become “a little bit safer” from job replacement. Abrahami said “nobody cares” about robots running fast or competing against each other in soccer, and other roles in athletes and the performing arts will remain.
According to Abrahami, tasks that require high-level thinking can currently be performed better by humans than by AI using current models. The CEO said that AI is not good at creating new things and that at its current level it is unlikely to invent new science.
Abrahami said replacing the cleaners would also be “probably really safe” because the job requires a lot of manual labor and could never be replicated by robots.
“We’re good at processing visual movement information,” Abrahami says.
In general, he said, jobs where people can shine and bring something “totally unexpected” to work are areas where there is no room for replacement.
