Introduction

The revolutionary impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already started to reshape the employment landscape. This has been highlighted by McKinsey report titled “The State of AI in 2023: Emergence of Generative AI”. The report underscores essential observations regarding potential shifts in the labor market, underscoring the importance of flexibility and readiness among both employees and industries. To understand the state of AI, McKinsey conducted an online survey of more than 1600 participants across regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures on April 2023. Based on their findings from the responses, the report has been published.

The report projects that by 2030, around 12 million individuals in the United States will have to switch to different job roles due to the progression of Generative AI. The automation facilitated by Generative AI advancements is anticipated to take over numerous mundane and repetitive tasks spanning diverse sectors. While Generative AI has the capability to automate a multitude of roles in sectors like Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, healthcare, construction, and various other professional fields, it also opens up avenues for expansion and development within these industries.

An interesting observation made in the report is that 79% of the participants affirm that they have encountered Generative AI to some extent, either within their professional sphere or in their personal lives. Additionally, 22% report that they actively employ it as a regular part of their work. The anticipated impact of Generative AI on businesses is substantial, and those surveyed foresee significant alterations to their workforce as a result.

The survey highlights that sector such as technology, media and telecom have the highest usage of generative AI tools followed by financial services. Interestingly, the technology finds more usage by women as compared to men. The other observation that stands out is that for those achieving exceptional results, the most significant challenge related to AI revolves around models and tools, whereas for others, strategy emerges as a prevalent obstacle. In addition to this, respondents from the survey also emphasized on the fact that there has been a slight shift from hiring AI-related software engineers to hiring roles in prompt engineering as there has been a steady increase of the latter in the past year.