Telemarketers are among the most vulnerable workers considered most vulnerable to AI job losses.(Unsplash:Berkeley Communications)
Australians are already losing work to AI, but the impact so far has been largely hidden from view.
Economists say it's also creating jobs at an unprecedented rate, but not always for the people in the firing line.
Benjamin* says he was one of those people earlier this year, although it's unlikely to ever show up in official figures.
All our jobs were replaced by chatbots, data scraping and email, he says.
We all got AI-ed.
His job in wine subscription sales was one of 121 positions made redundant in July by the ASX-listed Endeavour Group, which owns a number of prominent retail brands such as Dan Murphy's, BWS and Jimmy Brings.
Benjamin says staff were given the strong impression at the time that AI was a key factor.
The decision wasn't publicly announced by the company, and a statement to the ABC from Endeavour Group frames the job cuts as part of a broader shift towards a more digitally-led offering.
A feedback letter from the affected workers to management at the time, seen by the ABC, says: I have countless customers young and old … wanting to speak to a person rather than a bot.
From the perspective of anyone who was made redundant, there was nothing ambiguous going on, Benjamin says.
It's pretty interesting to watch them twist themselves in knots to not say 'AI' when that's exactly what it was.
Endeavour's statement says everyone on the sales team was able to apply for redeployment opportunities and that some stayed on to help manage the transition.
But Benajmin says there were plenty from the team who were left without work.
There were people in their 60s who had been doing it forever, saying, 'I don't know what I'm going to do now.'
How AI job cuts hide in plain sight
It's unclear exactly how much AI had to do with the cuts to Benjamin's team, but his story is indicative of a larger problem: AI-related job losses aren't always visible to the public, or even economists.
There's definitely a data issue, says Amit Singh, managing partner at the economic advisory firm Mandala.
The phenomenon is partly obscured by employers attributing AI-influenced cuts to a range of factors and making little or no mention of AI in their rationale.
Another camouflage for the impact of AI is cuts to hours, rather than outright job losses.
When we have big technological disruptions … it affects the number of hours [people] work, says Amit Singh.
So while you might still have a job … you have less income.
'We don't need writers anymore': the small businesses being reshaped by AI
The impact of AI has also been quietly unfolding in highly casualised parts of the labour market.
At one Sydney ad agency, the change was almost immediate.
Ezra Auperle began experimenting with ChatGPT as soon as it was released, just over a year ago.
I was like, holy shit, this is huge, he says.
It was only a month or two before he was using it in the workplace, to help the agency he leads, Story Machine, compete for contracts.
I was like, 'Oh my God, We just spent an hour of our time on a pitch that would have taken 8 hours and we just won 25 grand [worth of work] … That's a game changer.
Like most smaller agencies, Ezra's business has a small number of core staff and hires contractors to work on specific contracts.
We're fortunate that we don't employ full-time writers, because the first thing that would have gone would have been writers, Auperle says.
And I see that obviously in our contract bills — they're pretty much non-existent.
As soon as he grasped the new capacities of generative AI, he called a meeting, telling staff: We don't need writers anymore. We don't need storyboard artists anymore … You just need to learn how to ask [AI] the right questions so it gives you what we need.
And that was basically day one.
Ezra is also the CEO of a parallel animation company called Fox & Co.
Since that staff meeting, AI's role in both businesses has grown as the technology has become more sophisticated and tailored.
The previous two films we made, we had 20 contractors working on the animation [for each].
By contrast, the one they're making now involves zero.
That's 20 contractors gone, because what we're now using is AI motion capture.
Rather than animating characters frame by frame, we apply actors' movement to the animated characters … We can now do that with AI, he says.
We're working on nine of these films over the next three years, so that's 180 people that we're not going to be contracting.
Even so, Auperle is still hiring people, albeit fewer than half the original number.
While we've gone down 20, we're plus eight … so these are kind of high-end VFX film professionals, he says.
The real beauty is that … we're able to deliver a far-higher-quality product for the same budget.
It also means small studios are more competitive with larger studios in terms of what we can deliver.
AI job growth is outpacing the losses for now
Whilst the opposite is true in Ezra Auperle's animation studio, at an economy-wide level, AI is so far generating more jobs than it's taking.
What we found was there was a five-times increase since 2017 in terms of the number of AI-related jobs that were available, says Amit Singh, from Mandala.
According to their analysis, the number of jobs in AI doubled in 2023 alone — often in the same areas thought to be prone to cuts.
Mandala rates telemarketers, tertiary educators, events professionals, intelligence and policy analysts, legal professionals, counsellors, supply chain workers and insurance clerks as among the most vulnerable workers.
The jobs that are most exposed [to] AI generally tend to also create opportunities for people who can learn those particular skills, he says.
Based on snapshot research of Australian job ads, Singh estimates that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of AI-related jobs have already been created this year.
But he warns that more workers will be displaced in the years to come, and the transformation is likely to be swift.
When we see any significant changes in the labour market as a result of technological disruption, things happen very slowly. Then they happen all at once.
But Singh doesn't see the rollout of AI as a cause for alarm.
Most workers will be able to make those transitions by learning the new skills of the new economy, he says.
But there are going to be some that will be left behind.
One man's AI survival plan
Ezra Auperle is still an AI optimist, even if he doesn't always sound like one.
Will my business exist the way it exists today in three to five years? No way.
He predicts AI will be creating the vast majority of marketing content as soon as 2025.
That's why he's developed what he calls AI defensive strategies.
I think the big realisation is data, he says.
What data can we own?
We [plan to] build a proprietary AI that essentially uses the data we exclusively have access to.
I can't think of any other way that you can defend against AI … it's going to be smarter, better, more effective than humans.
If Auperle's plan for his own business works, there'll still be a place in it for humans.
We're early enough now to nail a really intelligent data partnership that is going to enable us to … continue to exist and to continue to employ real people.
*Not his real name
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-04/australian-jobs-being-lost-to-ai/103123682
