Currently, IBM employs around 260,000 people. Credit: Denny Müller on Unsplash.

American tech major IBM anticipates pausing hiring for positions that it believes artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually take over.

In an interview with Bloomberg, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company will suspend or pause hiring for back-office functions such as human resources.

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The company employs some 26,000 people in these non-customer-facing roles, Krishna said.

“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” he added.

This means, AI adoption will result in nearly 7,800 redundancies at Armonk, a New York-based company.

According to an IBM representative, any reduction in staff would also involve not filling positions lost to attrition.

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There are concerns that the labour market may be disrupted by AI tools, which have garnered attention for their ability to automate tasks, write text, and generate code.

Routine tasks like transferring employees between departments or providing letters of employment verification are likely to be fully automated, said the company’s chief.

Over the next ten years, he continued, it is likely that some HR functions related to workforce composition analysis and productivity will not be replaced.

Currently, the firm employs around 260,000 people and is hiring for customer-facing and software development positions.

In January this year, IBM announced layoffs, which could impact around 5,000 workers once complete.

Last week, e-commerce company Amazon began cutting jobs in its human resources and cloud services division.