How AI is changing the job market - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service

I have now been looking for a job for a year,

with more than 200 applications sent.

How much longer will I be kind of stuck in this limbo?

I guess between school and, you know, adulthood.

Most people I know have been impacted by layoffs at least once,

if not twice. Hey, it's Hannah here.

Welcome to What in the World, the podcast for all of your news, trends

and talking points from the BBC World Service.

Applying for jobs is really tough.

You've got to scour the internet for ads

and then put in all of that time and mental energy on an application,

and that's before you've even found out if you've got an interview.

But some people have been finding that process even harder than normal.

They've been putting in loads of applications and never hearing back.

And we've all heard the chat about AI taking our jobs.

And there have been some recent studies that suggest that AI is making it harder

for younger people and grads to get their first jobs.

So is AI after your job and what can you do to adapt?

I'm speaking to Nathalie Jimenez, a BBC reporter in New York.

Hey, Nathalie. Welcome back. Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so firstly this chat about AI taking entry level jobs.

How big of a problem is it? What do the studies say?

So I mean the quick answer is yes.

We're going through an AI disruption phase.

That's the phrase that you're often going to hear.

So yes, AI is starting to replace jobs and particularly entry level jobs.

Those are the first on the chopping block.

And that's because they're often administrative,

they're digital, they're repetitive.

They're basically jobs that AI can learn quite easily,

make more efficient, go faster.

That's very attractive to companies that are starting to look to cut costs.

So yes, young people are suffering the most.

And we see that in the numbers too. Stanford did a study and it said that

since late 2022, right when ChatGPT went big, people aged 22 to 25

have seen a 13% drop in jobs in roles that are easy for AI to handle.

So I'm talking software development, marketing, customer service.

Meanwhile, older workers are not affected in the same way.

So that's why the study essentially calls

young people 'canaries in the coal mine'.

There's a real problem because if people aren't being accepted

at entry level, then they can't progress up the chain

and then they can't get the expertise to get to those kind

of more secure mid and top level jobs, the ones where they have

those soft skills that can't be imitated or replaced by AI.

And of course, this isn't the only thing that's affecting

the US job market at the moment.

What are some of the other things that have been going on for young people?

Right. So this is kind of part of a bigger shift.

So we obviously have macroeconomic factors.

So after the pandemic there was a chilling in the job market.

Basically people are hiring less.

So that's one of the issues that we're dealing with too.

There is an oversaturated market. More people have college degrees

so there are more people applying for administrative jobs,

less so, you know, jobs in in retail. Those jobs in retail,

in healthcare, the ones that need a little bit more human interaction,

they're still going, people are still hiring.

Whereas the ones that need maybe,

you know, a college degree in the sense of computer science,

that was a job that was very, very in demand

a few years ago, now that's starting to decline.

So, yeah, the macroeconomic shifts right now in the economy, it's not great.

And then AI and then an oversaturated market, it's like the perfect storm.

And let's hear from some of you guys who got in touch

and are looking for work. This is Zola in France.

I work in the fields of arts and culture.

I hold two master's degrees, one in political and social sciences

and another one in cultural policy and administration.

I have now been looking for a job for a year

with more than 200 applications sent.

I think that on my part. There are several frustrations

that I'd like to highlight within this job hunting process.

The lack of formal answers from employers,

the disregard for experiences linked to internship

or traineeships, or even voluntary contexts.

I do not believe that AI should or can truly replace an artist or a playwright,

but it has been increasingly used to do so in several cases.

And so for me, it is a growing political and ecological concern.

And we got this from Laura in the US.

I just know so many people applying to jobs right now.

And right, like every company, not even tech anymore, right?

The federal government, entertainment, media,

consulting, finance, they're all laying off people.

So every industry is, you know, getting impacted.

And right when more people are laid off, more people are looking for jobs,

but there just aren't enough spots for everyone.

I think it's so tough for young people to find jobs right now.

Because right when companies are laying people off,

they're usually laying off the most junior people, right?

So they lay off the 20 somethings who just started working, right?

That's what happened to me. When they laid off my team at Google,

it was all the newest hires, right?

So everyone, basically everyone in their 20s got let go.

I feel like most people I know have been impacted by layoffs

at least once, if not twice, if not twice.

And here is Tiffany, a recent graduate from New York.

The company that I worked at, I worked at Apple

when I was an intern last summer.

They didn't have the headcount for another, like a full time employee.

And there are a lot less new grad opportunities.

There used to be more specific new grad programmes

out there for seniors to apply to.

Sometimes I'll feel more motivated and hopeful,

especially if I've been interviewing or

like I'm in like the later ends of an interview stage,

I'll start feeling more hopeful, like imagining myself in this job already.

But other times, you know, like, I'll be like waking up

in the middle of the night or like, I can't sleep and I'm just thinking

about how much longer will I be kind of stuck in this limbo, I guess,

between school and, you know, adulthood.

So it is a little sad sometimes, but I think it helps that I'm not alone.

And there are a lot of other people going through the same thing.

And talking about what some of the big companies have said, you know,

I've seen things from Duolingo and Amazon talking

about how how AI is going to change the way they hire in the future.

What is the message being sent out from these big companies right now?

So Amazon's CEO was pretty direct

in a message he sent to employees back in June.

He basically said that generative AI is going to reduce the corporate workforce

over the next few years quite significantly.

And that doesn't mean they're not going to hire anyone new.

They're still going to bring in people

to teams that are maybe a little bit more AI heavy.

But they expect to need fewer humans in general,

and that's going to land on youngest staff the most, again,

because they're doing these repetitive jobs.

But the ones that need less judgment, less critical thinking, that's going

to be replaced by AI, that's where they're going to want to save money.

At Duolingo, the CEO has said pretty much the same thing.

They're AI first now.

They already cut contractors, they're striking employees.

And not only that, but they're actually using AI

as part of their evaluation process.

So they're looking at how their employees are using AI

in their day to day to make themselves more efficient.

So it's not just enough to do your tasks well.

The company now wants you to prove that you're using AI,

and you're thinking about how to improve the work you're doing with AI tools.

So before they approve new hires,

managers are also going to have to convince basically the company

why AI can't do it and why they need a human.

But AI is also changing the application process for people going for these jobs.

Both in terms of how like the computers are now choosing, sorting

through the CVs, sorting through tapes that people might send in.

So actually choosing who might make it to interview, as well as

people using AI to be able to write their CVS and applications

and making it harder for them to to stand out.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, basically the job application process,

and you'll hear this from a lot of young hires, people

in the workforce, that it is changing.

Basically, when you used to apply for a job,

people used to be involved pretty quickly.

They used to look at your resume.

They used to maybe give you a call, skim, you know, your skills.

But now for lots of companies, the first reader is an algorithm.

It's AI. Resumes are getting scanned by AI for keywords.

Some firms are using AI chatbots to ask screening questions.

Some AI programmes are even analysing video interviews to score your answers.

So by the time a human actually looks at your application,

you've already been ranked by a machine.

So essentially, AI is going to be part of the most important segment

of the hiring process, which is the beginning.

So a lot of people, even in my close circle,

the way that you're applying for a job has changed.

Like you're going to look at the keywords that you need to put

in your application to make sure that you get flagged

or chosen by these AI tools. It's very formulaic.

That's why a lot of my friends are like, 'I don't want to write a cover letter,

I just want to, you know, go into my resume

and put in those keywords that I need to get chosen' because they know

that a person is not going to look at their application until much later.

Now let's hear the view from India. I'm speaking to Varun Mayya,

who's a YouTuber and founder of the generative AI company Aeos. Hi.

Hi. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, it's great to speak to you.

So you're based in India.

How is AI affecting people's jobs there,

and which are the industries that are most affected?

To be very honest, I don't think AI has really affected too many jobs in India,

except for a little bit of exposure in software in India.

Salaries aren't really, really high, so even

if you are using a tool, an AI tool,

you'd still want a human being to sort of use that tool and run it,

because the person has accountability, the person has context.

But there's also this huge section of people in India

and all over the world that, you know, for lack of a better word,

their only job is to translate somebody else's instructions.

Somebody else has made those decisions, has decided how it's going to be solved,

and they're just translating that into code.

You know, the original use case for transformer was - the technology

behind LLMs (Large Language Models) - was for translation.

So if you are doing that last piece, somebody else has come up with the idea,

somebody else has written the spec, somebody else is telling you this is

exactly how you need to solve it, this is the algorithm you need to use,

and then you're writing the code for it, yeah, then you're in trouble.

I think we've had zero people in the team,

in my avatar team, that have lost their jobs.

So we've actually had more work and a larger team.

In fact, the average creator, about two million followers

across Instagram, YouTube, would have a team about ten, 12 people.

Our team is slightly larger now.

It's about 16 people because the quantity of work.

We're also in a very hyper connected world.

So this is not ten years ago where you'd get like three or four opportunities.

Now you're getting like 30, 40 opportunities a month. You want to take all of them on.

So we keep expanding the team to absorb some of those opportunities.

Varun, I want to bring it back to grads and grad jobs

because there is relatively high youth unemployment in India.

I think it's about 16% of under 24.

So I want to ask you, given all of the changes

to the job market and the technology that we have available,

and particularly these roles that we've talked about,

the ones that could easily be replaced by AI,

what advice would you give to a grad or a student

or a young person trying to get a job right now? In all of these changes.

What I found to be really great for youngsters is to look at some,

is to look at an industry that's growing really fast,

where there's increasing demand, but low supply of good talent

or the supply of tools, you know, are not very good.

The tools are not very competent at, you know,

and you feel you have a shot at beating those tools,

not just today, but for the next two or three years.

Varun, thank you so much for speaking to us.

Thank you for for having me.

Nathalie, what would your message be to people who are graduating now

in this ever changing world? See, AI as your co-pilot.

AI is going to take care of the menial tasks, the repetitive tasks.

Now this is actually giving you an opportunity, for example, in college,

to maybe study things that are a little bit more considered soft skills.

So again, you're going to study computer science.

Why don't you go into philosophy? Why don't you go into psychology?

What basically experts are saying right now is what's valuable are soft skills,

critical thinking, judgment, essentially what makes us human.

So if you can tap into that, if you can tap into what AI doesn't have,

what we can add to the AI process,

you're actually maybe going to get a more fulfilling job experience.

And again, industries like the health care industry

or even the green tech industry and what I mean by that is like,

you know, let's say solar panel construction,

you're going to want to go to these industries that are using AI,

but that also need people in order to think about the ethics of it,

in order to think about how to improve these AI systems,

we're really going to need to tap into who we are as humans

and what makes us human in order to stay competitive in the job market.

Nathalie. Thank you. Thank you.

That's it from us. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode.

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I'm Hannah, this is What in the World from the BBC World Service.

We'll see you next time.