You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio work every day. So, as you know, jobs and focus today, Uh, this morning again people talking about what I missed that when talking about jobs, one subject that reliably comes up is AI, artificial intelligence and it's impact on labor markets. I want to point out that software to automate manual task Jason, you might find this industry interesting, is growing at twenty per year,
likely to reach about five billion. So I mean it's a it's a gramming impact numbers, Yeah, real numbers. So let's talk about this with Mark Ummureau. He is Senior Fellow and policy director at the Metropolitan Policy Program at book Brookings on the phone from Washington, d C. I'm rushing to get to you because I am curious how you see all of this. Nice to uh have you joining us on this Friday, Mark, So, I don't know. We talked about AI and the impact it's having on
the late remarket. What's some of the latest researcher writings that you have seen or done on this? Hey, well, it's great to be here. So you're rushing to make sure that your job remains while you finished it. Well, so okay, So so uh you know, this research that we've done focuses on AI specifically. This isn't about broader
forms of robotic and other kinds of automation. So AI specifically has its own particular uh footprint or work using patent data to identify on affected occupation shows that, yes, manufacturing has a lot of AI coming, but it's the white collar workforce that may be most involved with it.
And so what does that look like? You know, what what would it look like to to someone who's in a white collar profession now or maybe more importantly, a younger person who's going into college right now, and thinking about how this may affect the work force of the next fifteen years. Uh, it doesn't. What it doesn't mean necessarily is that all the jobs and all those occupations will go away. And this is things like market research,
sales managers, computer programming, financial advice, management analysts. All of those are going to be heavily involved with AI. We don't think that necessarily means that that they will be uh, you know, liquidated in some way. AUTO involvement doesn't mean
necessarily erosion of work. But we think it's definitely suggests coming uh flux and change, and and those coming into these occupations better be ready to roll with it, because at minimum, these technologies are going to change what people are doing, speed up change, and require new skills learning well.
And a lot of what we've heard in terms of conversations with various guests that you know we're all going to be working are not all of us, but maybe a lot of people are gonna be working alongside AI uh and getting an assistant what they're doing, and so those menial tasks are being done by computers, by AI and so on, and it frees us up to do more complicated things and do more of it. Yeah, I absolutely and it can be very much persuaded that that's true.
I think it's harder to see the upside in some ways for individual workers in a factory and where robotics comes in here. I think it very much is uh possibility that workers going to be freed up from the most boring drudgery, you know, cranking out standard reports every month, UH, get out from under that and get more into the interpretation, into the human interaction, the networking UH and all of that. I think that's true. Uh, I think there will be
a lot of change along the way. You know, in this is in our in our horizon is more than just the next five years. We're talking over ten, fifteen, twenty years. And so Mark, how should we you know, those of us who are mid career, how should we be thinking about either different training or you know, different ways of looking at the world. Are preparing ourselves for this different sort of future very much big changes ahead. I think there's the need to really get more focused
on adding value, doing what the machines can't do. So if a machine can do it, it can probably do it better than you can. So find we need to focus on the things that they can't do, and that's often things around judgment, UH, ethics, leadership, motivation, interaction, interpersonal exchange, you know, gauging UH complex situations. So I think there's there is a huge scope of work, all of the creative aspects of jobs can will likely be resilient for
a good long time. So I think I think though it is going to require more focus on what exactly you know, humans are bringing to each job. If you had to pick one industry, where AI and the type of work that you're saying will be displaced as a result. What would it be. Well, our research shows that, you know,
marketing and sales are going to be heavily involved. You know, we don't know if it's negative disruptions, but clearly very high scores in our forecast of association with AI And I think I think you can see why there's prediction of uh, you know, uh interest in things, prediction of sales. All of these things can be done, so I think, and I think they're some reporting. I think people in marketing and sales see some of this coming, but they believe that they will have a human role in the future.
But they know there's a lot of change coming. All right, really interesting insights. Thank you so much. Mark Morrow, senior fellow and policy director at the Metrotol Metropolitan excuse me, a policy program at Brookings C, joined us on the phone from Washington, d C.