IBM's top boss projected that some of its non-facing roles will be replaced by artificial intelligence in years to come.
"I do believe, and I’ve said this before, that A.I. is going to replace many clerical white-collar jobs, and that’s the kind which I expect A.I. will replace over the next five years," CEO Arvind Krishna told FOX Business' Liz Claman on "The Claman Countdown" Tuesday.
But it's "not as simple as jobs go away," he added.
"The number of jobs, though, perhaps in customer care, in coding, in business process, in developing artificial intelligence is going to increase so much that the net increase is going to be positive while there’s a movement from one area to the other."
AI WILL ONLY GET 'SMARTER AND SMARTER' OVER TIME: RAY WANG
Krishna also said Monday that hiring for back-office positions, such as human resources, which are non-customer facing, is expected to slow down or possibly be suspended.
"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
There are roughly 26,000 workers in non-customer-facing roles.
A spokesperson for IBM told FOX Business that while there is "no blanket hiring ‘pause’ in place," the company "is being deliberate and thoughtful in our hiring with a focus on revenue-generating roles."
AI CAN NOW HELP DIRECT YOUR CAREER PATH
It is also "being very selective when filling jobs that don’t directly touch our clients or technology," the spokesperson continued. IBM also noted that it's still actively hiring for thousands of positions.
Meanwhile, advances have been made recently in the AI space.
GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4 in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools such as Google's "Bard."
These advanced tools generate text, images and other content resembling the work of humans.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
