Executive Employment & AI: What Should We Expect In The Future?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is investing in businesses and disrupting professions, particularly low-skilled jobs hit hard by massive automation. But what about executive jobs? Are they, too, affected by the emergence of artificial intelligence? What are the predictions for the future? Response elements.

AI Is Booming In Executive Employment

Upon its arrival in companies, AI-first had a visible impact on the least-skilled, low-wage jobs. The latter are indeed more exposed to automation, accelerated thanks to AI. However, a report from the Brookings Institution (an American think tank) released at the end of 2019 indicates that the deployment of AI does not only affect “blue-collar” workers but also managerial jobs, particularly in the tertiary sector.

Among the executive professions most strongly impacted by the emergence of AI, we can cite software publishing or the design of computer systems in the field of high-tech digital services. Retail banking and insurance are also primarily concerned: a number of agencies are closing down in favor of the development of online banking offers. Likewise, accounting professionals (where outsourcing is the current trend) as well as secretarial professionals can see some of their tasks taken over by artificial intelligence.

Executives More Fulfilled At Work Thanks To AI?

However, it would be hasty to assert that AI directly threatens executive jobs. It is not intended to replace professionals but rather to free up their time, make their work more accessible, and make them more efficient. In any case, this is the opinion of several experts. However, many executives will have to adapt, develop new skills, and continue to train. Agility becomes the keyword to staying in the race.

Supported by managers and HR functions, executives will be able to abandon some of the repetitive and boring missions – now managed by AI – to concentrate on more qualitative tasks, thus allowing better fulfillment at work. The challenge today is to anticipate these changes to provide optimal support, leaving no one behind.

AI Generates New Jobs Among Executives

Optimism is in order. If some professions actually risk disappearing initially, AI should make it possible to invent many others. And certainly more than it destroyed, according to many specialists. The trend is already being verified with the proliferation of executive job offers in artificial intelligence itself. In 2017, the Association for Executive Employment (Apec) identified 2,398 offers of executive positions in artificial intelligence, compared to 1,127 in 2016, an increase of 113% in one year.

Apec also specified that the offers came from digital service companies, consulting and business management firms, or even engineering and R&D firms. Generally speaking, managerial employment is doing relatively well, and the indicators for the future are green despite the complicated health context at the time of writing these lines. As proof, Apec affirmed at the beginning of 2020 that executive employment was at its highest level: 281,300 executive recruitments took place in 2019, an increase of 6% compared to 2018.

According to forecasts, growth will continue at a rate of 5% in 2020 and the following years to cross the milestone of 300,000 recruitments in 2022. Apec also specifies that these recruitments are most of the time the result of job creations, opened to meet the new needs of companies, mainly in the field of IT and telecommunications, as well as engineering and R&D. The emergence of artificial intelligence in businesses has a lot to do with it.