An OpenAI exec identifies 3 jobs on the cusp of being automated

• Three industries are going to look very different in some years, says an OpenAI head of product.
• He said that life sciences would see a lot of automation, because admin can be automated.
• AI leaders are flagging white-collar jobs that can be easily automated by newer models.

Three industries are going to look very different in the next few years, according to an OpenAI executive.

On an episode of the "Unsupervised Learning" podcast, Olivier Godement, the head of product for business products at the ChatGPT maker, shared why he thinks a trio of jobs — in life sciences, customer service, and computer engineering — is on the cusp of automation.

"My bet is often on life sciences, pharma companies," he said, about his first pick for industries on the brink of change because of AI.

Godement said that the goal of pharmaceutical companies like Amgen, with which he works, is to design new drugs. This has two components: actual research and experimentation, and admin, a time-consuming process that could be automated, he said.

"The time it takes from once you lock the recipe of a drug to having that drug on the market is months, sometimes years," he said. "Turns out like the models are pretty good at that. They're pretty good at aggregating, consolidating tons of structured, unstructured data, spotting the different changes in documents."

Godement joined OpenAI in 2023. He previously worked on products for Stripe for eight years.

On the podcast, Godement said that while we haven't reached a stage where "any white collar job" can be automated in just a day, he is starting to see strong use cases in fields such as coding and customer service.

"The automation is probably not yet at the level of automating completely the job of a software engineer, but I think we have a line of sight essentially to get there," he said.

The future of software engineering has been one of the most heated tech debates of the year, as AI-assisted coding enters most companies' workflow.

An Indeed study from October found that software engineers, quality assurance engineers, product managers, and project managers were the four tech jobs that have been axed the most during layoffs and reorgs.

Lastly, Godement said that customer-oriented roles like sales and customer experience may be automated soon.

"I've been working a bunch with the folks at T-Mobile, the telecom company in the US, to essentially provide a better experience to their customers, and we're starting to achieve fairly good results in terms of quality at a meaningful scale," he said. "My sense is we'll probably be surprised in the next year or two on the amount of tasks that can be automated reliably."

Across the board, AI leaders are flagging white-collar jobs that can be easily automated by newer large language models.

In a June podcast, Geoffrey Hinton, who is recognized as the "Godfather of AI," said that eventually, technology will "get to be better than us at everything," but some fields are safer than others in the interim.

"I'd say it's going to be a long time before it's as good at physical manipulation," Hinton said. "So a good bet would be to be a plumber."

"For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody," Hinton said.

He identified paralegals as at risk, and said he'd be "terrified" if he worked in a call center.