By Fortune.com — Paolo Confino — The CEO of IBM, who has taken heat for suggesting many back-office tasks could be automated, maintains that the technology will create far more jobs that it will eliminate. During an appearance at Fortune’s CEO Initiative conference in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said it was a misconception that increases in productivity have to lead to job losses. “People mistake productivity with job displacement,” Krishna said onstage. He noted that, as IBM phased out a few hundred back-office HR roles over three to four years, as it added headcount in software engineering and sales roles. “The increase was like 8,000,” Krishna said. “The decrease was like 800.” Krishna specified that employees weren’t let go as a result of this transition—rather, certain roles were not backfilled when they opened up. But there’s no question that “repetitive white-collar jobs” will be affected by the technology, Krishna said, echoing a point he has raised in the past. “The first thing you can automate is a repetitive, white-collar job,” he said on Tuesday. But while AI could take over 10% to 20% of “lower level tasks,” he predicted it wouldn’t take a person’s job altogether, because no one’s job is composed entirely of these sorts of tasks, he says. He expects his programmers to get 30% more productive thanks to the technology. “I don’t intend to get rid of a single one,” he said. “I’ll get more.”
All of which is a boon for developed countries, where Krishna sees an ongoing labor shortage in the coming years. During his onstage interview at the CEO Initiative, Krishna drew a contrast between the scarce labor market in the developed world, which will be in dire need of supercharging productivity, and the developing world, which will have lots of ready and willing workers to fill open jobs. That’s similar to a point he made in a May interview with CNBC, saying successful implementation of AI was critical to maintaining the current quality of life the developing world enjoys. “Population is flat or, in the worst case, declining,” Krishna said at the time. “So you need to get productivity, otherwise, quality of life is going to fall. And AI is the only answer we got.”