Report: AI to Transform 92% of IT Jobs

Ndubuisi Francis in Abuja

A new report on, “The Transformational Opportunity of AI on ICT Jobs,” published by the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium has revealed that 92 per cent of information technology (IT) jobs would see a high or moderate transformation due to advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The biggest change would be experienced by mid and low-level positions, as manual tasks become less relevant or easily replaceable by this technology, the report said.

According to the report, while there was no doubt, AI would be a paradigm shift for society, but the extent to which it will replace human workers in the future remains up for debate.

To get a better idea of how AI would change the labour market for technology professionals, the recently formed AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium published the new report.

The AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium comprises some of the industry’s leading names — Cisco, Accenture, Eightfold, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft, and SAP — with advice from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO).

Others are Chain5, Communications Workers of America (CWA), DigitalEurope, the European Vocational Training Association (EVTA), Khan Academy, and SMEunited.

The study argued that the biggest changes would be seen in mid-level (40 per cent) and entry-level (37 per cent) technology jobs, as certain skills and capabilities become more or less relevant.

AI ethics, responsible AI, rapid engineering, AI literacy, and large language model (LLM) architecture are expected to rise in importance in this new era, while traditional data management, content creation, documentation maintenance, basic programming and languages, and research information will become less relevant.

Based on this development, the report noted that critical skills were needed in all IT jobs, including AI literacy, data analytics, and rapid engineering.

The consortium is therefore seeking to empower workers to reskill and upskill.

This comprehensive analysis provides insight into the impact of AI on tech jobs, as the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium is comprised of some of the industry’s leading names — Cisco, Accenture, Eightfold, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft, and SAP — with advice from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), Chain5, Communications Workers of America (CWA), DigitalEurope, the European Vocational Training Association (EVTA), Khan Academy, and SMEunited.

To produce the report, the consortium examined the impact of AI on 47 ICT roles across seven job groups: business and management, cybersecurity, data science, design and user experience, infrastructure and operations, software development, and testing and quality assurance.

The director of people, policy, and purpose at Cisco, the company leading the consortium, Francine Katsoudas said: “AI represents an unprecedented opportunity for technology to benefit humanity in every way, and we need to be intentional about making sure people are not left behind.”

On the consortium’s training commitment,

Katsoudas explained that, “across all member companies in the consortium, we have taken on the collective responsibility of training and upskilling 95 million people over the next 10 years. By investing in a long-term roadmap for an inclusive workforce, we can help everyone participate and thrive in the AI era.”

In detail, members of the consortium have made the following training commitments: