Las Vegas
—
The president of Cisco rejects the doomsday warnings from some tech leaders that synthetic intelligence will make entry-level jobs vanish.
“I just refuse to believe that humans are going to be obsolete. It just seems like it’s an absurd concept,” Jeetu Patel, who’s additionally the chief product officer at AI infrastructure firm Cisco, advised NCS.
While Patel acknowledged there might be “growing pains where people will get disrupted,” he strongly pushed again on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s feedback saying AI will spike unemployment to as high as 20% and get rid of half of all white-collar entry stage jobs.
He’s considered one of a number of tech leaders which have pushed again on Amodei’s narrative; others have said AI is more likely to change jobs by requiring staff to undertake new abilities somewhat than wiping out jobs utterly. Still, his feedback come amid a plunge in entry-level hiring and as tech giants are more and more utilizing AI in the office, elevating questions on the future of labor.
“Dario is a friend. We are investors in Anthropic. I have a ton of respect for what he’s done. In this area though, I have a slightly different opinion on a couple of different dimensions,” Patel mentioned Wednesday at Ai4, an AI convention in Las Vegas. “I reject the notion that humans are going to be obsolete in like five years, that we’re not going to have anything to do and we’re going to be sitting on the beach… It doesn’t make any sense.”
In specific, Patel mentioned he has a “huge concern” with Amodei’s line of considering that AI might wipe out entry-level jobs as a result of companies profit from including youthful staff who usually higher perceive new applied sciences.
“If you just say, ‘I’m going to eradicate all entry-level jobs,’ that’s the stupidest thing a company can do in the long term because what you’ve done is you’ve actually taken away the injection of new perspective,” the Cisco exec mentioned.
Patel argued that for some jobs, having important expertise can be a “massive liability.” For occasion, he mentioned folks usually maintain assumptions about issues that won’t have labored 5 years in the past, however do now.
That’s why Patel mentioned he spends “an enormous amount of time” with youthful workers and interns.
“I learn a lot from people who’ve just gotten out of college because they have a fresh and unique perspective. And that perspective coupled with (my) experience makes magic happen,” Patel mentioned. “It would be a really bad strategy to not have early in career people and entry level people injected in your workplace.”
However, some economists say there are early indicators suggesting AI might already be miserable entry-level jobs.
Even although the total job market has been largely wholesome, the Class of 2025 faces the worst job market for new college graduates in years.
For the first time since monitoring began in 1980, the unemployment charge for latest graduates (these 22 to 27 years previous with at the least a bachelor’s diploma) is increased than the nationwide unemployment charge, based on Oxford Economics.
Entry-level hiring has tumbled by 23% between March 2020 and May 2025, outpacing the 18% decline in total hiring over that span, based on data from LinkedIn.
This is going on for quite a lot of causes, a few of them unrelated to AI.
But AI does appear to be enjoying a task, some economists say. For occasion, Oxford Economics famous that employment in two industries weak to AI disruption — laptop science and arithmetic — has dropped by 8% since 2022 for latest graduates. By comparability, employment has little modified in these industries for older staff.
“AI is definitely displacing some of these lower-level jobs,” Matthew Martin, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, advised NCS in June.
Economists and AI researchers say the jobs most in danger contain repetitive duties that can be automated, similar to knowledge enter.
“The less interesting clerical jobs will go away. They will be automated. And if you don’t automate, you’ll go out of business,” Alan Ranger, vp of promoting at Cognigy, advised NCS on the sidelines of Ai4.
Cognigy would know: It sells conversational AI brokers that present buyer help for banks, airways and different companies.
Ranger mentioned Cognigy’s AI brokers got here to the rescue when German airline Lufthansa needed to cancel each flight as a result of a strike in Germany earlier this 12 months. The know-how allowed Lufthansa to rebook 1000’s of flights per minute, he mentioned.
Ranger argued that companies gained’t massively lay off buyer help staff as a result of people nonetheless must handle the AI brokers, design the software program and deal with different complicated points.
Yet he did concede that companies could have fewer buyer help staff in the future as folks depart the business and retire, and since corporations will rent for various roles.
“Account management and sales roles won’t get replaced anytime soon,” Ranger mentioned. “An AI can’t buy you a steak dinner.”
Patel, the Cisco govt, mentioned the onus is on the tech business and society as a complete to make sure a clean transition to superintelligent AI.
“In tech, we live in a bubble. We keep thinking, ‘Oh, disruption is just part of it.’ But when a steel mill worker gets disrupted, they don’t become an AI prompt engineer,” he mentioned.
Patel mentioned there’s loads of retraining and reskilling that have to be completed in tandem with governments and educators.
“The tech community has to actually take some responsibility for this,” he mentioned. “Because if we don’t, you will create some level of pain in society and we want to make sure we avoid that.”