PARIS: Predictions of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are likely overblown, but employers will seek workers with different skills as the technology matures, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup said at Paris’s Vivatech trade fair.

The world’s third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech in which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customisable autonomous AI “agents”, rather than humans. Their service was reminiscent of a warning last month from Dario Amodei, head of American AI giant Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

For ManpowerGroup, AI agents are “certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,” the company’s Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said. “If history shows us one thing, it’s most of these forecasts are wrong.”

An International Labour Organisation (ILO) report published in May found that around “one in four workers across the world are in an occupation with some degree of exposure” to generative AI models’ capabilities. “Few jobs are currently at high risk of full automation,” the ILO added.

But the UN body also highlighted “rapid expansion of AI capabilities since our previous study” in 2023, including the emergence of “agentic” models more able to act autonomously or semi-autonomously and use software like web browsers and email.

Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools would put pressure on workers, managers and firms to make the most of the time they will save. “If what happens is that AI helps knowledge workers save 30, 40, maybe 50 percent of their time, but that time is then wasted on social media, that’s not an increase in net output,” he said.

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2025