- Google’s Philip Moyer told Insider that generative AI will boost job satisfaction.
- He said AI tools are cutting out tedious work and that workers are now “waiting for it to show up.”
- Some fear AI could lead to job losses, with Goldman Sachs saying 300 million jobs could be impacted.
AI will help workers enjoy their jobs more by cutting out mundane and boring tasks, a Google executive has said.
Philip Moyer, vice president of Google Cloud’s global AI business, told Insider that rather than taking workers’ jobs, generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard will likely boost job satisfaction and help employees be more productive.
“I think satisfaction and proficiency is where AI is actually going to have the most profound impact,” he said in a recent conversation.
“If you look at people’s job satisfaction when using generated AI, the studies that are coming out of companies that are trying it, almost 80-90% of people are consistently saying yes. This has made my job better,” he added.
Fears have been raised that generative AI could lead to widespread job losses, with Goldman Sachs predicting that AI systems like ChatGPT could impact up to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.
However, experts have suggested that the new technology could cut out time-consuming administrative work, with a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finding that generative AI boosted productivity and improved employee morale.
“Most of what AI does, at least in its current form, are things that we don’t necessarily like to do,” Oded Netzer, professor of business at Columbia University, told Insider.
He compared generative AI tools to “auto-complete on steroids” that will complete mundane tasks such as writing emails and filling out spreadsheets, and said that they would have an especially big impact in industries with low levels of job retention, such as call centers.
And while he acknowledged that some roles would be lost as a result of the transition, he said an AI-powered productivity boost will likely ensure that predictions of widespread job losses will not come to pass.
“This is going to increase productivity, so we are likely to see more jobs, not fewer jobs,” said Netzer. “When was the last time you’ve seen a company that says, oh, we are doing so much better, let’s hire fewer people.”
Netzer compared AI to the introduction of ATMs in the banking industry. While this change meant that manual bank teller jobs largely vanished – it became cheaper to open a branch, and demand for branches increased, which created tons of new jobs.
Moyer told Insider that generative AI would transform industries such as finance, invoicing, and medicine that require large amounts of administrative work, and said that it was inevitable that companies would adopt the technology as employees were “waiting for AI to show up.”
“I don’t know a single person that, if you offered to take out 20% of their work, they wouldn’t be happy,” he said. “Quite frankly, I don’t see organizations going: ‘Well, we’re just not going to do anything with this anymore.'”
Google has launched a huge range of new AI products this year, as it scrambles to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI and Microsoft.
However, it has faced questions over the accuracy of generative AI tools such as its Bard chatbot, which like its rival ChatGPT is prone to “hallucinating” wildly false information.
Google is planning to launch a new AI model, Gemini, in the coming months, which reportedly has advanced “multimodal” capabilities that rival that of OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4 model.
Moyer told Insider that Google’s future models would see some “great breakthroughs” in “really hard multimodal problems,” enabling them to interpret multiple types of data at once.
But for now, he said that generative AI was in its “management” stage as tech companies try to root out accuracy issues and bring the enormous cost of running models down.
“I tell people that the next roughly three years or so of the industry is going to be about getting models accurate, getting models lower cost, and getting companies and organizations onboard,” he said.
“So this is going to be a management era and then I expect as you look over the horizon, that’s where you’ll start to get into reasoning and the really advanced problems, in this multimodal era,” he added.
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