Hiring in the Age of AI Means Proving You Need a Human
Not all tasks can be automated—at least not yet—but every potential job posting gives companies an opportunity to try.
Illustration: Aaron Fernandez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Artificial intelligence is evolving so quickly, corporate executives don’t fully know what it can and cannot do. But it’s already made them think twice about hiring actual people.
“We’re adopting the Elon Musk philosophy: You really have to make a good case to bring another human being into our organization,” Cathie Wood, founder of Ark Investment Management LLC, told reporters this fall. E-commerce platform Shopify Inc. has mandated for months that managers wanting to hire must “demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” Jeremy Barnum, chief financial officer at JPMorgan Chase & Co., described on a recent earnings call “a very strong bias” against hiring more people whenever the bank identifies a new need. “We know that even if we can’t always measure it that precisely,” he said, “there are definitely productivity tail winds from AI.”