Published on: May 22, 2025 at 3:37 pm
Artificial intelligence is often seen as a threat to employment, but it can be used to preserve jobs in times of uncertainty such as the current one when many economists are sounding the alarm about a looming recession.
Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said AI can be used to help businesses maintain skilled workforces when they may have to find ways to cut costs.
“What kind of jobs may disappear? What kinds of skills will you still need? What skills can we do without? There’s uncertainty there,” Bamberger said. “Perhaps you want to take that workforce and upgrade them over time.
“You have to know where your business is going and have a good sense as to what kinds of competencies you need,” he said. “There are clearly benefits to retaining your workforce as long as you can afford to train them to augment the AI and enhance its value.
“Increasingly organizations are doing this and using AI in this process.”
Bamberger said AI is now allowing organizations to better understand how to leverage and develop the talent in their workforce.
“Often we refer to something called the talent marketplace, something that organizations probably should have been doing decades ago, which is keeping inventories of their workforce’s competencies and skills,” Bamberger said. “AI is enhancing the ability of organizations to leverage the workforce they have in place by moving people around on short-term internal gigs in organizations and getting them prepared for positions that might open up in the future.
“These are systems that help organizations enhance the competency level of their workforce and limit the need to necessarily turn to the external labor market to secure the talent they need, which can be quite expensive,” he said.
“Ultimately it may offer a far more economical way to maximize the return from investments in human capital.”
There’s also a benefit of AI to employees, according to Bamberger.
“AI—having an understanding of the individual’s background and experiences and skills and competencies—can search through a wide range of projects that may require a month or two of work and then propose those to an employee during that individual’s slack time that they take on this additional project,” he said.
“And if they do enough of these projects over the course of two or three years, they’re going to be set to fill these new roles that they’re interested in doing and the organization needs them to fill.”
