The chief executive of a cloud-based enterprise software platform warns that unemployment among college graduates could surge more than 200% as AI agents proliferate.
In a new Squawk Street interview, Bill McDermott says that AI agents are now more than capable of performing tasks that college graduates do for companies.
“Well, I think it’s very natural to be concerned about jobs. I think young people coming out of university today is like 9% unemployment. I think it could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years. Because what’s happening now is for the non-differentiating roles, so much of the work is going to be done by agents. So it’s going to be challenging for young people to differentiate themselves in the corporate environment.
The other thing that’s going to be clear, if CEOs follow the ServiceNow platform, what we did is we took out 90% of the use cases that humans used to have to do for customer service. And we’re doing this for great companies like Pepsi, Panasonic Aviation, Bell Canada and Nvidia… All of these non-differentiating technologies are now being done on the platform by agents. So that will definitely put a damper on how many people you need to hire.”
According to McDermott, CEOs will likely forego hiring fresh talent in an effort to make their balance sheets look good to shareholders.
“I do think it’s coming quicker than people anticipate, because if you think about it… where the users are coming from, a lot of the users are coming from net new agents that are built into the workflow of companies like ServiceNow that are fundamentally changing the enterprise. So in our case, I can literally have the same headcount going out of this year as I came to this year with, expand free cash flow margin, grow my revenues by an even greater amount, and deliver more shareholder value because I use the ServiceNow platform. And I would assume that a lot of CEOs that are watching this fantastic program are saying, ‘Wow, why aren’t I doing that?'”
Earlier this week, former US presidential candidate Andrew Yang called on the government to stop taxing labor and start taxing AI agents instead to protect entry-level and white-collar workers.
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