The use of artificial intelligence (AI) could cause wages to fall in the future, a new survey suggests. As the Ifo Institute announced in Munich on Wednesday, many companies in Germany expect AI to bring "rather falling wages in the next five years". According to the findings, workers with less than five years of professional experience in particular must "expect lower wages".
Service providers are the most likely to anticipate wage cuts for their workforce: 53.3 percent of the firms surveyed in this sector — more than half — assume that wages will fall over the coming five years as a result of AI use for workers who have less than five years of professional experience and no vocational qualification or university degree.
Among retailers, 47.9 percent of respondents say the same, according to the Ifo Institute, followed by the manufacturing sector at 46.5 percent. Construction companies say so less often, at 39 percent.
Across all sectors, 48.3 percent of companies expect that wages for employees with less than five years of professional experience and without a degree from a university or university of applied sciences will fall over the next five years because of AI. A further 45.9 percent expect no effect, and only 5.9 percent expect wages to rise.
For employees with more than five years of professional experience, roughly half of the firms surveyed (49.8 percent) expect AI use to have no effect on wages. Even so, four in ten companies (40.4 percent) anticipate a decline in wages for this group, while 9.7 percent expect wages to rise.
The group for which companies most frequently expect wages to fall, however, is employees who hold a vocational qualification or university degree but have less than five years of professional experience: here, 50.8 percent of all firms surveyed expect lower wages within five years. At the same time, a third of companies (33.0 percent) expect no AI effect on wages in this group, and 16.3 percent even forecast an increase.
Companies are more likely still to expect higher wages for employees who hold a vocational qualification or university degree and have more than five years of professional experience. According to the survey, more than one in four companies (26 percent) say they expect wages for these employees to rise over the coming five years. Here too, however, many firms assume that AI use will cause wages to fall (37.5 percent), while 36.6 percent expect no effect.
"From the point of view of many companies, artificial intelligence will not affect wages for all employees to the same extent," concluded Ifo researcher Anna Ruffert. "They are most likely to expect falling wages for less experienced workers." Around 3,000 companies in Germany that already use AI were polled in June as part of the research institute's regular business surveys.
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