At Vivatech trade fair, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup said that the predictions of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are pompous, adding that the global companies will seek workers with advanced digital skills.

It is pertinent to note that the world’s third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech , during which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customisable autonomous AI “agents”, rather than humans.

AI agents are “certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,” Manpower Group’s Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic stated. “If history shows us one thing, it’s most of these forecasts are wrong,” he added.

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Earlier in May, a report published by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) revealed that approximately “one in four workers across the world are in an occupation with some degree of exposure” to generative AI models’ capabilities. “Few jobs are currently at high risk of full automation,” read the ILO report.

The ILO report also highlighted “rapid expansion of AI capabilities since our previous study” in 2023, including the emergence of “agentic” models more able to act autonomously or semi-autonomously and use software like web browsers and email.

Casting light on unemployment due to AI, Premuzic said that with the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools, pressure on workers would be mounted as managers and firms would like to save resources and most of the time. “If what happens is that AI helps knowledge workers save 30, 40, maybe 50 percent of their time, but that time is then wasted on social media, that’s not an increase in net output,” he maintained.