Employing GenAI

I had a conversation this past weekend with a friend, whose intellect and business acumen I truly admire, about Generative AI. Specifically, about how Generative AI is going to fundamentally change marketing teams, how we produce content, and how individual roles will change.

He had what I think was an accurate perspective on the adoption and growth curve of Generative AI, the overall impact it will have on the broader economy, and a way of analogizing it to previous technical automations and environmental changes that created a sea change for business (namely, the internet and globalization of manufacturing). 

He said that, if you looked back over the last 100 years, and the massive changes that took place - especially outsourcing to China for a lot of our manufacturing, the automotive industry expanding to Asia, and, of course, the internet - we would have all expected unemployment to be hovering around 10%, and yet, it is persistently stuck below 4%.

This is a reason to be sanguine about Generative AI’s impact on the job market. We may be worried about the risk it poses to, at least for marketing teams, junior-to-mid-level content production jobs, but the deck will be reshuffled, and those jobs will turn into other jobs, maybe even more interesting, challenging, and well-paying jobs. That would be great.

But, the same history that he referenced doesn’t bear that out. While unemployment has remained low, other problems have arisen. For most of the last several decades, income and wealth inequality have increased steadily. Educational requirements for better paying jobs are the norm, rather than the exception, making the leap from hourly-wage jobs to steady, salaried jobs more of a chasm than a gap. And, this final point is just an observation, but we seem to treat lower-wage workers as if they’re another cog in a machine largely run by computers, and, with the staff reductions that automation has made possible, those workers have less of an opportunity to unionize and form solidarity with colleagues than larger teams of the past. And unions, built in part by the sheer force of numbers, are what made “good jobs” good - safe, well-paying, with benefits - not the nature of the work itself.

So, I’m in agreement with my friend, that the overall unemployment rate may not be affected by the adoption of Generative AI. I think that it will create the same circumstances for different workers that other forms of automation and staff reduction have. We’ll have smaller marketing teams, there will be a bigger gap between junior members and executives, a reduced need for mid-level managers, a marked stratification between the “important”, MBA-requiring jobs and low-level work, and greater efficiency. 

With all the efficiencies, innovation, and productivity that GenAI promises, where do we expect the benefits to accrue? My friend thinks they may accrue to labor. I’m not that optimistic.