IBM CEO in damage control mode after AI job loss comments

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 146 points – IBM CEO in damage control mode after AI job loss comments
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IBM CEO in damage control mode after AI job loss comments::IBM CEO Arvind Krishna appears to be in a state of damage control following recent controversial comments on AI-related job losses.

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I just want to say that this is absolute clown-level CEOing.

Let's just set aside the naked antipathy for labor concerns. Let's pretend we're heartless investors.

If I heard a CEO say this, my first thoughts would be:

  • Why the fuck are you declaring an intention to remove people BEFORE the replacement is ready? If the technology is so ready, then deploy it and cut the workers after you've implemented it. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? This is sophomore level business shit. You sound like a 14 year old on Twitter.

  • Why the fuck are you generating this kind of press? Particularly for a company with a FAMOUS history of loyalty to its workers? Even if it's now bullshit, you're pissing on the brand, asshole.

  • Wasn't Watson a big famous over-hyped public embarrassment? Did you learn nothing about managing expectations?

  • The work you say you're excited to replace is the core business services you sell, and I don't know what product you're talking about. OpenAI has a product. Explain why they're not about to devour your business while you're out here talking nonsense.

This guy sounds like a moron.

I get what you're saying. And it's all accurate. But don't forget the CEO has two audiences. They have the people working for them. But they have investors looking at the future. So telling people that you're investigating tools that will make you more efficient, might entice investors.

So the CEOs walking the line of promising one thing to the investors and another thing to its clients, and a third thing to its workers.

FAMOUS history of loyalty to its workers

Never heard of this. Ever. Sarcasm?

No, I'm dead serious. This reputation is long dead, but back in the last century, before Jack Welch came along in the Reagan years and skull-f*cked the corporate world, it was a totally different time.

In the post-war years, IBM was famous as a company where the workers were treated like actual family. That's not necessarily a great thing, it's kind of creepy and patriarchal. But if you got a job there and did your work, after a decade or two, they'd keep you around even if your job became expendable or they knew they could hire a younger person to do it for less. It was just part of the corporate culture. Once you'd put in your time, you became a plant grandpa, and who fires grandpa when he's just trying to finish building up his pension?A heartless monster, that's who.

Those days are long gone, though. But from what I've heard and read, that used to actually be how this worked.

Reducing human oversight and intervention in HR will definitely not lead to problems down the road.

I look forward to getting the hiring LLM to glitch and hire me at an insane salary and bonus.

Honestly that's not that crazy of a possibility

I could swear I remember a similar story at some big tech company where a guy was hired on at like 5x the intended salary due to a fat finger on the input field, and it took them years to realize

As far as I can tell, the troublesome comments were:

“That means you can get the same work done with fewer people,” he said at the time. “That’s just the nature of productivity. I actually believe that the first set of roles that will get impacted are - what I call - back office, white-collar work.”

Someone should make a really good AI suite for CEO tasks

Every piece of data available shows no correlation between executive pay and performance. Fire your CEO and save the cash on AI.

  • ability to make decisions based on arbitrary gut feelings, then blame everyone under you when things go wrong
  • ability to take 1 sentence of meaningful info and turn it into a full press release filled with nonsense and buzz words
  • general inability to actually produce anything with consistent quality without requiring high levels of supervision
  • costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year

As far as I can tell, the only one of those that chatGPT doesn't already do is the last point, and I guess you could just light the money on fire (or if you wanna get really crazy, use it to increase worker pay)

This company famously stopped being loyal to its employees back in the 90s.

About the same time they stopped being relevant too. This is another one of those great American zombie companies that continues to live on simply based off inertia from successes of decades past.

60Billion in annual revenue us nothing to sneeze at.

They just stopped doing retail products, so they disappeared from the public eye.

They are B2B services and patent licensing mostly now.