Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become a positive job motivator by 2020, rather than a threat to jobs, claims Gartner.
"Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, Research VP at Gartner.
"AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, eliminating millions of middle and low-level positions, but also creating millions more new positions of highly skilled, management and even the entry-level and low-skilled variety."
"Unfortunately, most calamitous warnings of job losses confuse AI with automation, and overlook the greatest benefit which is AI augmentation, a combination of human and artificial intelligence, where both complement each other."
Garther reckons that in 2021 AI augmentation will generate $2.9tr in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.
Mike Rollings, Research VP at Gartner, added: Rather than have a machine replicating the steps that a human performs to reach a particular judgment, the entire decision process can be refactored to use the relative strengths and weaknesses of both machine and human to maximise value generation and redistribute decision making to increase agility."