It is increasingly difficult to avoid the tentacles of Artificial Intelligence (AI), much more so when it comes to the workplace. At the end of 2023, the number of occupations whose activity, for better or worse, is more affected by the emergence of these new technologies already exceeds 11.1 million, while for another 10.1 million occupations this impact would be more attenuated . This means that there are already more jobs whose evolution will depend on AI than those that will not.
An increase that is especially relevant if compared to the situation of the labor market prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, since 2019 the volume of jobs impacted by AI has increased by 11.6%, according to a report published this Monday by the Association of Financial Analysts, AFI.
Despite the undoubted risk that this poses for the current mass of employees in Spain, the analysis does not exude pessimism. “Although this result makes us more vulnerable, while AI could replace a good part of the tasks performed by these workers in the short term, in the medium term it could turn into productivity gains. That is to say, AI represents a challenge for optimizing work, as it allows us to free up hours of more routine work to allocate them to other tasks in which AI has not yet been deployed with the completeness that it has already done in the first,” the document notes.
Beyond the qualitative assessments, the quantitative ones also endorse this thesis. “Taking 2019 as a reference, the year before the pandemic, the most exposed occupations were the ones that were most reinforced during the most complicated moments of Covid-19. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, their work dynamics have been more favorable than those of those occupations less exposed to AI. Although it is true that the year immediately after, 2021, a good part of the contracts that were concluded in 2020 were undone, since then its work dynamics have been more favorable than those of those occupations less exposed to AI. What’s more, the important pace of job creation that the Spanish economy maintained in 2023 was based, above all, on the occupations most exposed to AI and not on tasks with lower added value,” the report states.
The branches of activity in the services sector have a greater degree of exposure to AI and not so much other macro sectors, such as construction, industry or the primary sector. Within these services, the most imminent challenge facing them are financial services professionals, programming and information technology services, as well as legal and accounting services, activities that together represent 6.5% of the total in 2023.
In line with the profile of the affected professions, the territorial distribution of the impact is located in those areas of the country with a greater weight of these services such as In 2023, the Community of Madrid, Catalonia, the Basque Country, together with Navarra and Cantabria are the only autonomous communities with a percentage of occupations exposed to AI higher than the national average.
“These will be the ones that will have to make the most effort to accompany the productive fabric to successfully face the challenge that AI implies for a large part of the employed in these regions. Even if the rest of the autonomous communities are not so exposed, their transition towards an economy more intensive in the use of these technologies would also be desirable, since otherwise the existing regional divergences could be maintained, if not widened, causing social and economic problems. economic problems of another kind (inequality)”, point out from AFI.
The challenge is no longer foreign to anyone and, according to another report published this Monday by the consulting firm Mintsait, 20% of companies in the consumer and retail sector are already integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their business strategies and 47% It is used when it comes to manufacturing products. According to the study, titled “AI: x-ray of a revolution underway”, digitalization has become a common practice in these organizations and artificial intelligence has been gaining ground since its rise in mid-2022.
The report reflects that the marketing and sales areas are leading the integration of AI in companies in the consumption and retail sector, promoting a culture of reinvention and transformation within the sector. Regarding the motivations for adoption, 77% of those surveyed highlight the improvement in efficiency and optimization of internal processes, among which inventory management and supply stand out (58%), the production and manufacturing of products. (47%), or improving store efficiency and customer experience. “The sector has responded to the new macroeconomic panorama by accelerating its digital transformation process to be able to respond to the demands of an increasingly digitalized consumer. This commitment puts convenience, security and an improved and personalized customer experience at the center,” says Arancha Pérez-Navarro, director of Retail, Consumer and Pharma at Minsait.
