As a daily user of these LLM tools, I confident they greatly overestimated the capabilities of the tools and there's no way this model is accurate or comprehensive enough to factor in the various complexities of all these jobs . If your value add was low enough that ChatGPT or Claude can fully replace you, then your job was automated already, or at the very least, shipped off overseas to the lowest bidder.. It is fair to say that if this AI actually worked, businesses could put more duties on a single employee, so departments of 12 could be reduced to 8, for example. However, it's not eliminating the job. It could theoretically slow expansion of headcount as well.
However, I am EXTREMELY skeptical of any business that says they replaced humans with AI. It's basically unheard of to quickly cut headcount based on productivity gains. Historically, when you introduce automation, it works in tandem with your humans to increase output. Marc Beinhoff is the posterboy of this fraud as he's the first major CEO I know of to brag about laying off people because of his mystery AI he refuses to demo. Traditionally, someone in his shoes would keep the employees and either expand the scope of his offering or ship things faster. Almost all publicly traded businesses prefer growth over cost savings and I am skeptical that salesforce.com saturated every market it is in and has no more growth opportunity. He clearly overhired and is cutting costs, but outright lying to investors.
Sci-fi AI?...yeah, Jarvis, the Matrix, HAL9000, Mother (Alien), etc could really take a chunk out of the labor market. ChatGPT? No fucking way. This study is just enabling this fraud.
However if these garbage LLM tools ACTUALLY worked, most employees wouldn't be replaced. They'd find themselves doing the same job, but with much much greater scope...for example front-end developers would be expected to be full stack developers...but really almost no software engineer is a pure coder. We're problem solvers. Writing Java? really fucking easy. It's my full time job..it takes about 10% of my time, at most. The other 90% is high level design, figuring out requirements, and troubleshooting issues...things AI either absolutely cannot do or is piss poor at....and given the stakes, no one is going to vibe code their way through a production issue when billions of dollars of revenue are on the line. Eventually? yeah, they'll cut headcount to accommodate for productivity, but almost no business in the world prefers cost saving to growth. Most want to get as much growth as fast as they can and worry about efficiency later. Most would rather crush their rivals than do exactly what they did last year, only 11% cheaper.