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Posted on 01/15/2026 1:43:58 PM PST by nickcarraway
Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder says jobs eaten by bots don't come back
Interview Analyst firm Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst J. P. Gownder remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity.
“Where we are today, we're not seeing it,” he told The Register in an interview this week.
During our conversation, Gownder cited US Bureau of Labour Statistics that suggest the advent of the personal computer also did not improve productivity, which improved by 2.7 per cent annually from 1947 to 1973, but just 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2001.
“So despite all those PCs, it [productivity growth] was a lot lower. And [from] 2007 to 2019 it was 1.5 percent. If you look at these numbers, productivity is the foundation of job replacement and of job growth and a whole bunch of things. But when you look at this … you begin to get the picture that information technology isn't measured always in as linear a way into productivity as people assume. It just isn't there.”
That might all change in the future if AI agents improve, but Gownder cannot find evidence that today’s AI boosts productivity.
“[Nobel Prize winning economist] Robert Solow said that by 1987 the effects of the PC revolution can be seen everywhere, except in the productivity statistics. That holds true today as well,” Gownder said. “Productivity just has not soared.”
The absence of a tech:productivity link is known as the Solow Paradox and is often cited when economists consider IT spending.
“The truth of the matter is that with the exception of 2001 to 2007 when productivity was 2.8 percent growth per year, we actually never did see the PC revolution, to the extent that you might imagine,” Gownder said.
Forrester’s most recent AI job replacement research estimates that the technology could uproot 6 percent of jobs by 2030, or about 10.4 million, through robotic process automation, business process automation, physical robotics and generative AI.
Gownder believes jobs that AI takes won’t come back, as typically with job losses after economic rebounds.
“These jobs are lost structurally, like they're gone for good, because they've been replaced. That's not an insignificant hit to the economy,” he said.
To determine the jobs that are at greatest risk of being erased by AI, Gownder and his colleagues considered the roughly 800 job types and 34 skills defined by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, spoke with 200 companies, and developed a method similar to the one used by University of Oxford scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in their 2013 study that measured how susceptible jobs are to computerization.
“We use that to then ask ‘Is AI good at these capabilities and these tasks?’ And by building that model, what we're able to do is to understand how strongly AI influences each of those 800-something job categories when we cross reference that with the automation potential that Frey and Osborne came to,” he said. Forrester can then calculate the “automation potential” for many jobs.
The analysts also pondered whether large organizations are capable of using AI and, if so, the technology’s effectiveness.
“A lot of generative AI stuff isn't really working,” Gownder said. “I mean, enterprise, and I'm not just talking about your consumer experience, which has its own gaps, but the MIT study that suggested that 95 percent of all generative AI projects are not yielding a tangible P&L benefit. So no actual ROI. McKinsey has something like 80-something percent that don't. It is just further context that says we're not at a place where lots and lots of people are losing their jobs right now.”
In calls with more than 200 organizations Gownder said researchers found that some of last year’s large-scale job cuts were belt-tightening decisions, not the result of shifting work to AI.
“So then that's not losing a job to AI. That is a financial decision masquerading as an AI job loss. They're just saying: ‘Well, we're hoping we'll fill it with AI at some point.’ So that is a very different proposition than AI is actively stealing all these jobs.”
There is a real phenomenon of a frozen white collar job market in which corporations are not hiring for open roles as a hedge to see if jobs can be duplicated with AI, he said.
“But let's face it, when you have work to do, it's got to get done at some point,” Gownder said. “If the AI doesn't work out, they're either going to have to hire or they're going to have to find some other solution.”
Gownder said historically, the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs in the USA’s “rust belt” was driven by globalization not robotics, and he sees a similar scenario playing out now with AI.
“Outsourcing is a very popular one,” he said. “They’re firing people because of AI, and then three weeks later they hire a team in India because the labour is so much cheaper.”
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A person talking to a milk pitcher has nothing to do with AI.
A person talking to a milk pitcher has nothing to do with AI.
Talk to the milk pitcher and you’ll get more out it than talking to AI ,LOL
“Talk to the milk pitcher and you’ll get more out it than talking to AI ,LOL”
Stupid comment of the decade.
I have received productive gains by using it and savings on expenses and help with creating new revenue. I guess it’s going to start with a few of us,
Please don’t hold your breath waiting for AI to boost productivity or boost corporate profits.
How to be lazy, and rely on a chess program.
LOL...that’s funny!
This is generally true for innovative technology introduction. You have a new technology with great potential, but you have existing processes, existing infrastructure (organizational), existing employees with existing training standards. It takes decades to rebuild at the enterprise level to leverage the disruptive technology (e.g. electricity, microprocessors, the internet, now LLMs/advanced neural networks).
I’m already well past being sick of hearing those two letters: A I
Should be A O: Artificial Obsession.
Hilarious!
If this keeps up, the future is not looking bright.
Now, with AI I am able to go beyond just the skills I am an expert in, and incorporate knowledge from peripheral fields that I would otherwise have go on a personal learning curve to master a new domain. It is in that integration across adjacent boundaries that AI will shine.
However, AI’s greatest weakness is in the realm of reasoning. Not matter how fast AI gets and processing incoming data and trying to make sense of it, a human will always be better at making intuitive decisions based upon factors that cannot be derived from simple data analysis. An example of this is the ability of a human driver to tell what another driver is about to do, even though the motion of the other vehicle hasn’t yet given it away.
AI will have its place, and can benefit us so long as the Silicon Valley “cool kids” stop believing the absurd notion that it can become a substitute for human thinking, or even conscious itself. Those mistaken beliefs flow from a materialistic worldview that believes that human thought and consciousness is only a mechanistic calculation of a brain that is just a biological computer.
Perhaps the advantage of AI is that we can get dumber and dumber and still get the job done.
I wrote a whole book on AI. Some obvious upside. But when you dig deep, there is some scary stuff embedded in it. Scary thermodynamics.
It does have the potential to rip up the job market.
> I wrote a whole book on AI.
A whole book? Cool. Tell us something about it. Title? Topics/Aspects? Have you published it? Sold any copies? Inquiring minds..... :-)
Don't list how/where to buy it -- FR rules prohibit solicitation/sales, even inadvertent.
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