- Morgan Stanley predicts AI will shift jobs rather than cause permanent unemployment
- New occupations like chief AI officers and AI governance specialists will emerge
- AI will likely create hybrid roles combining product management and engineering skills
From Silicon Valley boardrooms to trading floors, predictions of widespread job destruction driven by artificial intelligence have unsettled employees and rattled markets. Yet a new research note from Morgan Stanley offers a calmer assessment: most workers are unlikely to be left behind permanently. Instead, they are expected to move into new occupations, many of which have yet to be created, according to Fortune.
“While some roles may be automated, others will see enhancement through AI augmentation, and other, entirely new roles will be created,” the report said.
Seeking to counter fears that artificial intelligence will erase millions of jobs and sharply increase unemployment, analysts at Morgan Stanley turned to historical precedent.
They noted that major technological upheavals over the past century and a half, from electricity and mechanised farming to computers and the internet, reshaped how people worked, but they “did not replace labour.”
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The rise of spreadsheets in the 1980s offers a useful parallel. While the technology automated labour-intensive financial calculations and reduced demand for some clerical roles, it also allowed analysts to focus on higher-value work and led to the emergence of new careers in finance.
Artificial intelligence is likely to follow a similar path by merely changing “job types, occupations, and needed skills” rather than eliminating work altogether, said the report.
Morgan Stanley's research offers a glimpse of the types of jobs likely to emerge as AI adoption accelerates. The bank predicts that companies will increasingly turn to “chief AI officers” to manage AI integration across their operations.
At the same time, demand is set to rise sharply for specialists in AI governance, covering areas such as data regulation, policy controls and cybersecurity, particularly in highly regulated industries like healthcare.
The technology industry is also expected to produce hybrid roles that blur traditional boundaries, including combinations of product management and engineering. With the help of natural-language coding tools, product managers are likely to take a more hands-on role in early development, experimenting with ideas and refining prototypes themselves before passing them to engineering teams for full-scale rollout.
The spread of artificial intelligence is expected to give rise to highly specialised jobs across the economy. Consumer industries are likely to recruit roles such as “AI personalisation strategists” and “AI supply-chain analysts” that sit at the intersection of data analytics and customer experience, while industrial companies may lean on experts in predictive maintenance and intelligent energy systems.
In healthcare, the focus is expected to shift towards “computational genetics” and oversight roles designed to manage AI-based diagnostic tools.
Morgan Stanley believes the market's alarm over artificial intelligence disrupting entire industries could be overstated. The bank points out that the services and cyclical segments, which have borne the brunt of recent weakness tied to disruption concerns, represent only a modest slice, roughly 13%, of the S&P 500 by market value.
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