The AI Boomerang Is About To Hit Hard
Reality vs speculation.
I, along with many others, have been yelling from the sidelines that AI can’t replace jobs for a while now. They cost too much, are far too inaccurate to be genuinely autonomous (given that they aren’t actually intelligent), and don’t increase productivity in a way that threatens human labour on any meaningful scale. Well, it turns out the people who have been almost pervertedly pushing for AI to eradicate human workers have only just discovered the truth and are now rapidly U-turning on this ‘revolutionary’ technology. Who would have guessed?
There is a lot of evidence out there that the corporate world is rapidly bailing on AI.
Forrester Research found that 55% of employers who laid off workers because of AI now regret that decision. OrgVuefound something almost identical, with 55% of business leaders admitting they made the wrong call eliminating jobs and replacing them with AI. Earlier this year, Gartner predicted that half of all companies that replaced customer service or operational employees with AI will be forced to restaff those roles. Sinch, a cloud communications company, surveyed 2,500 AI decision-makers across multiple industries and countries and found that AI customer communications agents have a 74% rollback or shutdown rate. Customer communications was once considered one of the easiest jobs for AI to replace, yet it is failing catastrophically. Robert Half and Orgvue found that 32% of HR say organisations have already had to rehire positions previously replaced by AI, explicitly because AI couldn’t actually replace these roles.
This has been dubbed the “AI boomerang effect”. This is when companies that once bullishly ploughed headlong into AI layoffs are having to rapidly U-turn, given that their ignorance and unfounded confidence in the technology has been laid bare.
But why is AI failing to replace these jobs? Well, there are actually multiple reasons — namely, cost, hallucinations, and lack of productivity gains.
