If you think it’s hard to find a job now, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott says just wait until AI really gets going. Speaking to CNBC‘s “Squawk on the Street” panel, the AI software executive laid out an apocalyptic employment future for Gen Z in which nearly one in every three people will soon be unemployed.
“I think it’s very natural to be concerned about jobs. I think young people coming out of university today [are experiencing] 9 percent unemployment,” McDermott told CNBC. “I think it could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years.”
“So much of the work is going to be done by agents, so it’s going to be challenging for young people to differentiate themselves in the corporate environment,” he said.
The CEO isn’t exactly a neutral party as he stokes fears about AI. ServiceNow’s software-as-a-service model has struggled on the stock market in recent months, lagging due to investor excitement around AI agents. The company is increasingly moving its eggs from software into the AI basket, as evidenced by its “strategic collaboration to power agentic AI experiences” with OpenAI, which was announced earlier this year.
As a CNBC intraday trading ticker showed, the company’s stock even got a tiny boost as McDermott delivered his doomsday prognosis live on air.
Like other tech CEOs, McDermott doesn’t pause to wonder if it’s worth slowing down and considering what all this could mean for the mass of workers and families who will struggle under such a scenario. His attitude, instead, is enthusiasm.
“We will have billions of users in the next several years that we could never have gotten from human beings,” he added.
If there’s any good news, it’s that CEOs don’t get the final word — at least if politicians like Bernie Sanders have anything to say about it. In recent months, Sanders has essentially dared the AI industry to put up or shut up, arguing that if AI really is about to destroy the economy as we know it, the logical move would be to shut everything down until we can figure out what it all means for the economy and workers.
More on the job market: AI Job Loss Is Breaking the Psyche of Workers, Psychiatrist Warns
