Rometty Sees AI Changing, Not Eliminating, Future Jobs

In IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s vision of the near future, all businesses will need artificial intelligence to succeed, but software and machines will take jobs away from very few actual humans, according to Bloomberg.

“There’s so much fear-mongering around what AI is,“ Rometty said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Sooner Than You Think conference in New York. “When it comes to complete job replacement, it will be a very small percentage; when it comes to changing a job and what you do, it’ll be 100 percent.“

Rometty said the issue of skills is “front and center“ in the U.S. now, even without considering the impacts of AI. She reiterated her view that education has to be “fundamentally revamped“ in this country for “the era of man and machine.“ Rather than a dystopian vision in which robots rule the world, Rometty sees AI, or cognitive computing as IBM calls it, as a tool for humans to make better business decisions. And there’s a $2 trillion market for that, Rometty said.

Every company owns troves of data that can be used to train algorithms to identify pertinent insights, she said. That proprietary information gives companies a competitive advantage, and can provide a boost to those businesses with long histories and lots of institutional knowledge that are threatened by fast-moving upstarts. “I am betting that the incumbents will come roaring back when they realize they have those advantages,“ she said.

For her part, Rometty said her legacy at the 106-year-old IBM is to leave it “reinvented for this next era so it will live on for the next 100 years.“ While she has reached the traditional retirement age for IBM CEOs, Rometty has said she plans to stay at her post for a while because her work to transform the company isn’t finished.