World Economic Forum job report reveals 75% of companies will adopt AI by 2027

According to the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 74.9% of companies will be utilising AI over the next five years. The report states that almost 23% of jobs globally will change by 2027, with AI and tech positions being at the forefront.

But while new positions will be created, it’s not all good news.

The report estimates new technologies will result in 69 million jobs worldwide, however, 83 million jobs will be lost as a result of their implementation. This net loss of 14 million jobs equates to a 2% drop in the global workforce.

The World Economic Forum also expects to see an uptick in business tasks being tackled by machines. According to the businesses it profiled, the number sat at 34% in 2022, but it expects the figure to increase to 43% by 2027.

“We’ve been looking at both automation and other forms of technological change for some time. We’ve tried to build a sense of what we call the human-machine frontier. What types of tasks and skills are getting automated? On average, the respondents to our survey do not find that tasks are more automatable today than they were three years ago,” Forum managing director Saadia Zahidi said.

“The automation of physical and manual work is no more accelerated than it was three years ago. To some extent that’s because it’s been occurring already.”

Where the World Economic Forum sees the bigger change occurring is in the generative AI space, which has been the hot button topic since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

“But when it comes to very human traits like coordinating between people, like helping with decision-making and reasoning or communicating, that’s where actually you see an uptick. That’s where you see a greater prediction around automation than before,” Zahidi said.

“It’s not surprising because we’ve all seen what is happening with generative AI and how fast that’s getting adopted across various industries. That’s exactly where there’s some prediction that we’re likely to see further disruption.”

According to the report, AI and big data are jointly ranked at 15 when it comes to current core skills looked for in employees. However, it’s considered the number three priority for company training strategies between now and 2027. This jumps to first place for companies with more than 50,000 employees.

The report also reveals that AI and machine learning specialists are the top growing jobs globally.

We can’t actually be shocked by this AI revelation

And this is all rather unsurprising. Since ChatGPT became the flavour of 2023, big and small tech companies alike have been rushing to launch their own products and services.

In March, Microsoft launched 365 Copilot, which is powered by GTP-4 as well as Security Pilot for cybersecurity professionals. It is also trialling its new ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine, while Salesforce is partnering with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Slack.

On the creative software front, both Canva and Adobe have revealed their own generative AI offerings.

Earlier in the year, Google unveiled its own answer to ChatGPT, Google Bard, with the chatbot making a mistake during the presentation that resulted in shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet, drop by $100 billion at the time.

But despite the rapid growth of AI in workplaces, it’s still sitting at number eight when it comes to technology adoption by businesses. It’s being outpaced by the likes of digital platforms and apps, big data analytics, cybersecurity, e-commerce and cloud computing.