Dive Brief:

• About three-quarters (76%) of large U.S. businesses with plans to automate over the next 12 months anticipate using artificial intelligence to replace employees, according to a quarterly survey of CFOs by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta.
• The number is up from 55% of automating companies of this size that deployed labor-replacing AI initiatives over the past 12 months, according to the survey results, released Thursday. 
• “CFOs say their firms are tapping AI to automate a host of tasks, from paying suppliers, invoicing, procurement, financial reporting, and optimizing facilities utilization,” Duke finance professor John Graham, academic director of the survey, said in a press release. “This is on top of companies using ChatGPT to generate creative ideas and to draft job descriptions, contracts, marketing plans and press releases.”

Dive Insight:

As AI adoption surges, governments around the world are scrambling to address various risks associated with the technology, including the potential displacement of workers.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that nearly 40% of jobs globally could be impacted by the rise of AI, with the technology replacing some tasks and complementing others.

A guide published last month by the U.S. Department of Labor advises employers to implement AI technologies transparently with the “genuine input” of workers and their representatives. The guide was a follow-up to a sweeping AI executive order issued by President Joe Biden last year.

The Duke University study found that automation ranks as a high or moderate priority for a majority of companies (65%), both large and small. Sixty percent of respondents said their company has used technology over the past 12 months to automate tasks previously performed by employees, and about the same number said their organization anticipates doing so in the next year.  

Top motivations for replacing workers with technology in the last 12 months included enhancing business processes (87%), increasing output quality (58%), improving output quantity (49%) and reducing labor costs (47%).

The study found that AI-driven automation in particular is displacing workers at a faster pace among large companies compared with smaller ones. In contrast to the 55% of large automating companies that deployed labor-replacing AI initiatives over the past year, 29% of small automating companies did so during the same period, according to the research.