Afraid about losing your job to artificial intelligence? You're not alone.
More than half of the people responding to a Pew Research Center survey said they were worried about the future impact of AI use in the workplace, and 32% think it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run.
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Only 6% of workers queried in the survey of 5,273 employed U.S. adults said workplace AI use will lead to more job opportunities for them in the long run.
About a third said it will lead to fewer opportunities for them, and 31% say it will not make much difference.
It's not surprising that people are concerned about their careers. A McKinsey report projects that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, with 60% significantly altered by AI tools.
Mark Zuckerberg has a different point of view.
“I tend to think that for at least the foreseeable future, this is going to lead towards more demand for people doing work not less now,” the chairman and CEO of Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) said in recent interview.
Meta CEO: AI will create more jobs
“The common belief is that all the jobs are going to go away and actually that has not really been how the history of technology has worked,” he added. “You can create things that take away 90% of the work and that leads you to want more people, not less.”
Meta has certainly been busying expanding its AI capabilities.
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The social media giant is reportedly in talks to acquire voice AI platform PlayAI, according to Bloomberg, which could help Meta bring more voice features to its AI assistant and its smartglasses.
PlayAI creates AI-powered voice features with the goal of being as “responsive as a conversation between two people,” according to a company blog post
Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant has one billion monthly active users across the company’s family of apps, Zuckerberg said at the company’s May 28 annual shareholder meeting.
He noted that the “focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment,”
In April, the company said it was launching a stand-alone artificial intelligence app and going head-to-head with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
And during Meta's first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said that “the major theme right now of course is how AI is transforming everything we do.”
“The first opportunity is improved advertising,” he told analysts. “Our goal is to make it so that any business can basically tell us what objective they're trying to achieve — like selling something or getting a new customer — and how much they're willing to pay for each result, and then we just do the rest.”
Analyst cites Meta's AI investments
Zuckerberg said businesses used to have to generate their own ad creative and define what audiences they wanted to reach, but “AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their product than many businesses are themselves, and that keeps improving.”
“And now AI is generating better creative options for many businesses as well. I think that this is really redefining what advertising is into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale,” he said.
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“And if we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today,”
The total number of ad impressions served across Meta's services increased 5% and the average price per ad increased 10%.
Susan Li, Meta's Chief Financial Officer, said during the call that Meta has invested for many years and continues to invest in driving ad performance improvements, adding that “year-over-year conversion growth remains strong.”
“For us, we really believe, first and foremost, that advertising is a relative performance game,” Li said. “That’s especially important for us because the vast majority of our business is direct response advertising.”
Piper Sandler cited Meta's advertising efforts in a June 27 research note. The firm boosted its price target on the company to $808 from $650 and kept an overweight rating on the shares, according to The Fly.
Meta's investments in AI are transforming its advertising technology, driving higher ad performance, conversion rates, and return on ad spend, Piper said.
New tools like AI models GEM, Andromeda, and Lattice, which are responsible for selecting and recommending ads displayed on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, can drive revenue growth in the mid-teens for multiple years, the firm said.
Piper Sandler, which says Meta is a new Top Large Cap Pick, adds that higher ad pricing is being driven by better conversion, and not lower engagement.
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