The governor of the Bank of England has warned that training workers to use artificial intelligence will be “critical” for dealing with the potential disruption to jobs caused by the emerging technology.
Andrew Bailey said on Sunday that the overall impact of AI on employment was “highly uncertain” but that there were already signs the British labour market was being affected.
“In the UK, in the last three years, new online vacancies in the most AI-exposed roles have decreased by more than twice as much as in the least exposed group,” he told a conference in Saudi Arabia.
“But, on the positive side, there has been an observed significant increase in new tasks such as integrating AI tools into firms’ workflow processes.”
He cautioned that “education and training in AI skills will be critical” and that “we shouldn’t resort to oversimplified conclusions on the employment effects”.
His comments capped a week in which stock markets were gripped by renewed fears about AI that wiped more than $1 trillion from value of the world’s largest tech and software companies.
One cause of the rout was the release by Anthropic, a leading developer of AI models, of a series of new tools for companies. One aimed at the legal industry offers to automate work such as contract reviewing, while Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4.6 model could carry out tasks including analysing complex information and drawing up presentations and spreadsheets.
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As well as raising fears about the impact on jobs, the new products spooked investors, who worry that AI will overtake the business models of other companies. This caused sharp falls in the shares of FTSE 100 groups including the information and analytics business Relx, London Stock Exchange Group, which has a huge financial data division, and Sage, a provider of accounting software.
At the same time, concerns that AI hype has gone too far hit America tech stocks. Amazon, Alphabet,which owns Google, Facebook-owner Meta and Microsoft all unveiled plans to spend $660 billion between them this year on the data centres and computer chips required to power their AI models.
Worries they will struggle to generate returns from these enormous investments hit their share prices last week, adding to the AI-driven market turbulence.
The falls follow big gains in US tech stocks in recent years amid investor euphoria about the potential for AI, although this has also stoked worries, including on the Bank of England’s financial policy committee, of a market bubble.
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Bailey said: “We have seen evidence of fear of missing out, backed by arguments along the lines of this time is different, for instance because of the expected productivity benefits of AI.”
He warned that this was contributing to “a risk of some complacency in financial markets” and that “expectations of AI driven productivity gains could be disappointed”.
He said he was “an optimist on the potential for AI and robotics to move the dial on productivity, and thus economic growth” but that their influence on the labour market was “an important question”.
While they could boost productivity by automating repetitive tasks and also create new jobs “that could not have been imagined before”, AI and robotics might also “reduce the demand for labour” in some areas.
“Some industries might shrink, others grow, and affected workers will need to retrain to adapt their skills,” he said.
