According to Bloomberg, a report on chief financial officers released by Deloitte on Wednesday local time shows that large UK companies are preparing to use artificial intelligence to replace staff over the coming year. In the survey, 52% of CFOs expect to use AI to carry out layoffs; more strikingly, 67% of respondents admit that the transformation AI has brought so far has delivered only a mere quarter of what they expected—the technology is still in its early stages, yet the knife is already raised.
Deloitte surveyed 66 CFOs from September 17 to October 1, including 12 from FTSE 100 and 25 from FTSE 250 constituent companies. The report corroborates signs of "jobless growth" in the UK: with AI deployment叠加 high employment injury costs—no, with AI rollout compounded by high labor costs, companies no longer hire heavily as they expand, long-term unemployment is rising, and the youth unemployment rate has hit a more-than-decade high. The irony is that all this is happening in an economy growing noticeably faster than its European peers.
Minister promises "ordinary people won't bear it alone," but the profit math doesn't add up
This poses a difficult problem for Prime Minister Andy Burnham's Labour government and has pushed AI Minister Kanishka Narayan into the spotlight. In a speech on Monday, he promised "never to let ordinary workers alone bear the cost of the AI revolution," and said he understood the public's anxieties about jobs and the future of the next generation.
Yet while companies are using AI to cut costs, they cannot be sure the math will yield profits—only a third of CFOs believe AI will lift profit margins in the coming year. Multiverse, a London training platform founded by Euan Blair, released another report this week pinpointing the crux: companies keep pouring money into AI tools while barely training employees on how to use them. "Few companies know what their employees can actually do with AI," so the investment is draining away. The technology can be bought, but the skills haven't kept up—that may be the real worry in the British workplace.