IBM’s CHRO preaches fluent AI jobs blasphemy. Here’s why it’s critical that business leaders everywhere pay attention to what’s she’s saying!

So we’ve all heard the prevailing wisdom, haven’t we? AI is coming for all our jobs – Ⓒ doom-mongering AI vendor CEOs everywhere – but some jobs more so than others. In particular, they’re coming for the ‘drudge’ end of the market, those repetitive tasks that oil the wheels at every organization. For example, according to data from The Tony Blair Institute, admin jobs and basic secretarial roles are those most exposed to AI.

Another standard meme is that AI is also coming for entry-level jobs. This seems to me a more interesting debate. I was struck by a comment/question from a couple of the members of the diginomica network, our dedicated community of 400 CIOs, when they said they worry that automating the “graft” (the manual work) for junior staff will destroy the learning process and critical thinking.

The question that raises is that enterprise do automate entry-level work—the very work where junior staff traditionally learn their…