PARIS: Predictions of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are likely overblown, but employers will seek workers with different skills as the technology matures, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup said at Paris`s Vivatech trade fair.

The world`s third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech in which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customisable autonomous AI `agents`, rather than humans. Their service was reminiscent of a warning last month from Dario Amodei, head of American AI giant Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

For ManpowerGroup, AI agents are `certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,` the company`s Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said. `If history shows us one thing, it`s most of these forecasts are wrong.An International Labour Organisation (ILO) report published in May found that around `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, the ILO added.

But the UN body 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.

Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools would put pressure on workers, managers and firms to make the most of the time they will save. `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 said.-AFP