'Job transition with AI will not be as dramatic as feared'

Susan Athey, professor of economics of technology at Stanford University, talks about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the workforce and the economy, and how interoperability is important for competition in the digital space, in an interview with Ruchika Chitravanshi and Asit Ranjan Mishra in New Delhi. Edited excerpts:

- 

Do we expect Al adoption to outpace earlier technologies like personal computers, or will regulatory, infrastructure and trust bottlenecks slow its adoption?

I don't think there's a single answer. Some uses have low adoption costs and will go quickly. Using ChatGPT on a browser is very easy to access. For companies, using internal chatbots is easy to adopt but that does not change the economy all that much. A lot of the things that change the economy have bigger adoption costs and go more slowly.

The easiest change to make is to stop hiring entry-level workers because you don’t know what you want them to do. So that’s where we're seeing the quickest response. My overall conclusion is that the job transition will mostly not be as dramatic as some people fear. But in very specific groups, like entry-level workers or call centres, it will be bad.