A surge in Generative AI likely to compliment jobs, says ILO

The ILO report comes amidst Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGTP, stoking worldwide discussion around the benefits and drawbacks of AI since its launch last November.

The report, released this week, encompasses a global perspective and provides crucial insights into the potential impact of generative AI on various occupations and tasks.

The chatbot responds to prompts and generates text. Companies and the general public use it in many ways, including managing workflows, quickly responding to queries, writing code, composing essays, planning vacations, and creating personalised content for social media.

The ILO report found that clerical work was the job category with the highest exposure to technology.

In other occupational groups – managers, professionals and technicians, for example – only a small share of tasks was found to be at risk of redundancy.

Generative AI’s potential to automate jobs

“As a result, the most important impact of the technology is likely to be augmenting work – automating some tasks within an occupation while leaving time for other duties – as opposed to fully automating occupations,” the report said.

The study also documented notable differences in the effects of Generative AI on countries at different levels of development linked to current economic structures and existing technological gaps.

In wealthier countries, 5.5 percent of total employment is potentially exposed to the automating effects of Generative AI, whereas the risk is only around 0.4 percent in low-income countries.

“Such insights are necessary for proactively designing policies that can support orderly, fair, and consultative transitions, rather than dealing with change reactively,” the report added, highlighting the need to design policies that support an orderly, fair and consultative transition.

The report also said the socioeconomic impacts of Generative AI will largely depend on how it is adopted and rolled out.