AI will create jobs, U.S. CEOs say in survey

KPMG has asked American chief executives whether artificial intelligence will create jobs, and the chief executives have said yes. Marvellous. No sector, no timeframe, no asterisk — just belief. The same survey found 53% of them are still planning workforce reductions in some areas — 'some areas' being the phrase you reach for when you'd rather not specify which ones, on the grounds that the ones are people. Both findings sit in the same document, unbothered, like a man insisting he loves animals while holding a net.

Consider the epistemics. KPMG sells AI transformation advice to the very executives it has surveyed about whether AI transformation is a good idea, and the answer came back affirmative. This is the research equivalent of asking a pub whether it would like another round, and it is being reported as a finding, with the words 'coalescing around a belief' doing the work of a verdict. The belief, note, is not that AI has created jobs. It is that AI will. Cheques in the post, chaps.

And 53% planning cuts while professing faith in job creation isn't hypocrisy, exactly — it's portfolio management. The jobs AI creates will be somewhere; the jobs these particular CEOs are trimming will be somewhere else; the two sums will never appear side by side in the same slide. KPMG didn't disclose how many CEOs it asked, in which areas, or over what period, which gives the whole exercise the structural integrity of a fortune cookie. Still, it's reassuring that the people with the largest financial stake in the answer are so buoyant about the answer. Give it eighteen months and somebody will cite this survey as proof the transition is going smoothly.