Why IT leaders think generative AI will create jobs

AI: more production, fewer people… or both?

This week: good news about AI. Really.  

This is the age of AI and as they pursue digital transformation, IT leaders are having to rethink how they run their departments and invest in technology platforms. No-one really knows where this road leads, and recently one of our columnists asked the readers of CIO.com is this the end of IT as we know it? 

Unsurprisingly it is a popular article. And it caused our CIO readers to ponder a further philosophical question: is the goal here to increase productivity, or cut costs? Maybe as is so often the case it is a bit of both. 

In any case Smart Answers lives for these questions, parsing generations of reported insight from CIOs to come up with conclusions. But where there is no consensus there are no definitive answers. From Smart Answers we learn that while many company boards are pushing for AI to cut workforce costs by approximately 20%, most IT leaders anticipate increasing headcount in response to generative AI. 

Find out: Do IT leaders see AI reducing headcount or improving productivity? 

How AI is changing developer roles

Good news that IT leaders at least think that generative AI will jobs to IT. But what about the impact of agentic AI, in particular on developer roles? 

Over on InfoWorld we recently published a piece that addressed that question. It suggested that instead of working with a single coding agent, developers will soon realize gains by guiding a team of them.   

But if multi-agent AI workflows are the next evolution of AI coding, what does that mean for developers? Not for the first time this was a question top of mind for our developer audience.  

Smart Answers has collated all our human reportage and detects another positive outcome. It suggests that agentic AI is poised to significantly transform the roles of software developers, shifting their focus from routine coding and debugging to more strategic and creative tasks. Furthermore, it says that most practitioners see this as a positive development. 

Find out: How will agentic AI change developers’ roles? 

What about those productivity gains?

So far this week we have learnt that – potentially – generative AI is going to increase IT roles, and agentic AI is going to make developers more creative. Good news for humans, but will someone please think of the software platforms? 

Another big article in the past week was this piece on CIO.com that asked what parts of ERP will be left after AI takes over? Many organizations use agents and copilots to take out the drudgery work often associated with ERP systems, but others see an evolutionary alliance. 

This caused readers to ask Smart Answers whether all of this is driving measurable productivity gains. Further good news: according to our generative AI tool, recent studies and industry observations indicate significant measurable productivity gains from AI agents. 

Find out: What measurable productivity gains are recent studies showing from AI agents? 

About Smart Answers 

Smart Answers is an AI-based chatbot tool designed to help you discover content, answer questions, and go deep on the topics that matter to you. Each week we send you the three most popular questions asked by our readers, and the answers Smart Answers provides. 

Developed in partnership with Miso.ai, Smart Answers draws only on editorial content from our network of trusted media brands—CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World—and was trained on questions that a savvy enterprise IT audience would ask. The result is a fast, efficient way for you to get more value from our content. Why IT leaders think generative AI will create jobs – ComputerworldRead More