At the end of 2016, Sun Microsystems founder and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made the eye-catching statement that, in future, up to 80% of IT department jobs could end up being replaced by artificial intelligence-based (AI) systems.

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Ironically, this would mean the sector that has done so much to automate away other people’s jobs over the past 40 years could find itself getting a taste of its own medicine. So should IT workers be quaking in their boots at this point or is the future rather brighter than Khosla’s prediction would have us believe?

The view of Hans Stiles, head of IT for the Arriva UK Trains Shared Service, is somewhat mixed.

“Do I agree that automation could render four in five IT jobs redundant? No,” he says. “Do I agree that automation will have a profound impact on the size and in-demand skills of an IT department? Absolutely.”

But in his opinion, the current move to AI is only the latest iteration in a “massive drive for consolidation” that has been going on for years under the guise of everything from virtualisation to cloud – and this drive has already had a “huge impact on the size of the IT department and the types of people employed”.

As a result, Stiles simply sees the “AI automation piece as a further evolution”.

In skills terms, he believes that commodity, repetitive, low-value “functional tech” roles will be undoubtedly be at risk in the new world.

But, on the other hand, as the IT department of the future adopts an increasingly advisory service/systems integrator role developing “solutions based on commoditised building blocks”, he expects that the skills required to run it will inevitably become more sophisticated.

“People will need to move from being hands-on technicians to being able to manage strategic relationships, suppliers and off-the-shelf solutions,” says Stiles.

“There’ll also be an increased need for change managers as we move to a more agile mindset, which means people will require the softer skills necessary to make the process smooth and to take users and the business with them.”

How skills will shift in the age of automation This scenario will likewise see IT manager roles being replaced by IT business managers, who will act as account managers that handle the relationships between specific business teams and products. Chris Rosebert, head of data science and AI at specialist tech recruitment consultancy Networkers, is also sceptical that as many as 80% of IT department jobs could disappear as a result of automation. He cites the company’s recent Voice of the workforce report, which was based on a survey of 1,656 IT professionals worldwide and found that only 4% believed their role would no longer exist in five years time. Rosebert believes Brexit will have more of an impact on the overall tech employment situation than automation, as leaving the European single market will only make massive skills shortages in the UK worse. “Demand for tech skills is just going to increase. Automation may have some effect on service desk and infrastructure jobs, but the main impact will be on outsourcing and offshoring companies as processes – such as claims handling or answering call centre queries – are brought back onshore and automated. That’s where we’re seeing the main cases for AI,” he says.