What keeps the CEO of the billion-dollar company Wix up at night? The future of the workforce.
“I’m really worried about the employment market,” Avishai Abrahami told Business Insider.
The CEO said that a “massive amount” of roles will shrink due to AI advancement. He predicted that roughly 70% of the top 20 most popular jobs in the US today will be affected by AI over the next five to 10 years.
Abrahami said he’s concerned about computers outsmarting humans, a concept often referred to as artificial general intelligence, which some tech leaders have said we have already surpassed in some ways. In that reality, humans “become the monkeys,” the CEO said. He said when he grew up, getting to such a point “was a science-fiction thing,” and it’s now becoming a reality.
Abrahami said he doesn’t know whether that future is next week or 10 years from now — but he said it’s closer than 15 or 20 years from now.
However, AI will also create new opportunities and job types, Abrahami said. For example, Wix just introduced a new role called the xEngineer, described as a design-first engineer with deep domain expertise who uses AI as a key part of every workflow. The position is for a specialist who is “amplified” by AI, the company said in its announcement.
Abrahami said some jobs are more at risk than others:
Most likely to be impacted in the near future
Abrahami said one of the most common jobs in the US — driving for ride-share apps, taxi, and truck drivers — will be affected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported more than 4 million of those jobs in 2024.
Alphabet’s Waymo has already launched self-driving services in multiple cities across the US, and Tesla just launched robotaxi rides without human oversight in Austin, where it has offered the service for several months.
The CEO said that people working in customer service or call center positions will also be affected. Other tech leaders, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, similarly said that AI will take customer service jobs first.
Other roles, such as software developers and analysts, are already seeing AI reshape their jobs. A Google Cloud report released in September found that AI adoption had surged to 90% among software professionals.
Least likely to be impacted in the near future
The CEO predicted that jobs that require human performance or interaction will be a “bit safer” from job replacement. Abrahami said that “nobody cares” about robots running fast and competing against each other in soccer, and that athletes and other roles in the performing arts will stay.
Jobs that require high-level thinking are also performed better by humans than by AI right now with the current models, Abrahami said. The CEO said that AI isn’t great at creating new things, and it’s unlikely to invent a new science at its current level.
Abrahami said that janitors are also “probably really safe” when it comes to replacement because the job requires a lot of handwork, which robots are far from being able to replicate.
“We are very good at processing visual movement information,” Abrahami said.
In general, he said, jobs where humans can shine and bring something that’s “completely unexpected” will be the areas where they’re safe from replacement.
