Artificial intelligence (AI) is spreading its tentacles faster than some would like, especially in the workplace. A report by the consultancy Analystes Financers Internacionals (AFI) has found that in Spain there are already more jobs affected by this technological innovation (11.1 million) than the jobs where the impact is more attenuated: 10 .1 million remaining.
This increase is particularly relevant if compared with the situation of the labor market prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. Since 2019, the volume of jobs affected by AI has increased by 11.6%.
Despite the risk that this advance poses for the current mass of workers in Spain, the report focuses on the benefits that this new technology will have in the long term. “Although this result makes us more vulnerable, since AI could replace a good part of the tasks performed by many workers in the short term, in the medium term it could turn into productivity gains.”
AFI analysts believe that artificial intelligence poses a challenge for optimizing professional performance “because it allows hours of more routine work to be freed up for other tasks in which AI has not yet been fully deployed” .
Beyond the qualitative evaluations, the quantitative ones also ratify this thesis. “Taking 2019 as a reference, the year before the pandemic, the occupations most exposed to AI were the ones that strengthened the most during the most complicated moments of covid”.
In the same way, during 2023 the important rate of job creation that the Spanish economy maintained “was based, above all, in the occupations most exposed to AI”. Obviously, the branches of activity in the service sector are those that present a greater degree of exposure to AI and not so much the other large employment-generating sectors such as construction, industry or the primary sector.
The most important challenge due to its imminence is faced by professionals in financial services, those in programming and information technology services, and also workers in legal and accounting services, activities that together represent 6.5% of the total in 2023.
In line with the profile of the professions affected, the territorial distribution of the impact is located in the areas of the country with a greater weight of these services in their GDP.
In 2023 the Community of Madrid, Catalonia, the Basque Country together with Navarra and Cantabria were the only autonomous communities with a higher percentage of occupations exposed to AI than the Spanish average.
Every day, more and more companies are aware of this revolution and dedicate a significant part of their activity to AI. Another report made public yesterday, by Minsait, which under the title AI: x-ray of a revolution in progress, assures that digitization has become a common practice in companies in the consumer and trade sectors. And that is precisely where artificial intelligence has been gaining ground since it experienced its first boom in mid-2022.
The report reflects that marketing and sales areas are leading the integration of AI in companies, and are fostering a culture of reinvention and transformation within the sector. With regard to the motivations for adoption, 77% of respondents highlight the improvement of efficiency and the optimization of internal processes, among which inventory management and supply (58%), production and product manufacturing (47%), or improving store efficiency and customer experience.
What is not yet clear is the effect this new technology will have on the energy transition. The Institute of Engineering of Spain (IIE) calculated a few months ago that a search in ChatGPT (one of the most popular AI engines) consumes three times more energy than in the Google search engine.
