IBM CEO addresses job concerns with AI and declining populations.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have pointed to declining working-age populations to calm fears about artificial intelligence (A.I.) stealing jobs. While job losses in the near term might be inevitable, A.I. will have an overall positive impact because of enhanced efficiency and the technology’s ability to replace professions already getting harder to fill in shrinking labor markets. However, A.I. could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation. Krishna recently said that IBM would slow or suspend hiring in non-customer-facing roles that currently amount to about 26,000 workers.