Businesses trying to do more with less have historically leaned on automation during recessions, but the advent of generative AI could scramble the typical pattern of winners and losers when the next downturn strikes.
While white-collar knowledge workers have previously not suffered from severe recession-induced layoffs or jobless recoveries, the next time could be different, JPMorgan senior U.S. economist Murat Tasci said in a note Tuesday.
“More specifically, we think that during the course of the next recession the speed and the breadth of the adoption of the AI tools and applications in the workplace might induce large-scale displacement for occupations that consist of primarily non-routine cognitive tasks; henceforth non-routine cognitive occupations,” he wrote.
Since the late 1980s, jobs that focus on routine tasks have been disappearing because of automation,…
