Much like the internet and the advent of the smartphone, A.I. adoption in the workplace has the potential to be both hugely beneficial and profoundly risky. While workers are eager to use generative A.I. like ChatGPT to their advantage, they also fear the technology could one day reach a level of sophistication that would pose a genuine threat to their own jobs—and their pay.
Seventy-nine percent of workers feared or were on the fence that A.I. implementation would become so beneficial at helping them with their work that employers would issue a pay cut, according to a survey of 3,000 employed American adults by Checkr, a company that provides employee background screening. Millennials led the pack at 82%, compared to 78% of Gen Xers, 77% of boomers, and 74% of Gen Zers.
But workers wouldn’t mind that as much if they were given a four-day workweek in exchange; 57% of respondents said they’d willingly take a pay cut in that case.
And nearly all (86%) of workers said, bar none, they’d take a pay cut to work less if A.I. could help them get all of their work done quicker. But a similar number said they’re worried A.I. adoption would make their jobs redundant, and they expect layoffs to come within the year.
Their fears may not be unfounded; IBM’s CEO recently announced that he plans to cut all jobs A.I. can do. But there’s no reason yet to panic. Experts mostly expect generative A.I. to affect about 10% of work tasks for eight in 10 U.S. workers. Plus, jobs that rely heavily on science and soft skills like creativity and critical thinking are least likely to be affected.
Monster career expert Vicki Salemi has long advised workers to focus on soft skills as a means of “robot-proofing” their jobs. “Instead of waiting for tasks to be automated, audit your current job,” she writes. “Ask yourself what can be done by robots and what can’t and start adding value assuming there are parts to your job that are already automated.”
Plus, even if A.I. becomes the go-to for more than 10% of your workload, not all is lost; most bosses’ goal is to add capabilities, not cut jobs. As Andy Bird, CEO of education company Pearson, pointed out, any worker has the capacity to upskill and meet the next iteration of work.
“For example, if you’re an accountant, you already possess 25% of the skills you need to become a data scientist,” Bird said. “So we only need to reskill a bit; you have some of the basic core competences to take you from Job A to Job B.”
Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella—whose company invested heavily in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT—says cutting human jobs is not the goal. Rather, if executed correctly, A.I. in the workplace doesn’t threaten anything creative; it just eliminates the “drudgery.”
Workers may already be ahead of the game; 85% of those Checkr surveyed said they’ve used A.I. to perform tasks at work already. But most (70%) are afraid to tell their bosses so far, fearing they’d realize A.I.’s utility and be likelier to eliminate human jobs—or at least cut their pay. Again, millennials are leading the way in both instances.
But luckily for anxious workers, there is some precedent—even if A.I. itself is new.
“Every 10 to 15 years, we have a technological breakthrough that negatively impacts some jobs while creating new industries and career fields,” Jack Kosakowski, president and CEO of Junior Achievement USA, said in March. “We saw this with personal computers in the early ’80s, the internet in the mid-’90s, smart devices and social media about 15 years ago, and now A.I.”
The good news is that even if A.I. does eliminate scores of jobs, it will also create an array of lucrative new ones paying well over $300,000—probably enough to put the anxious respondents to Checkr’s survey at ease.
