Your Remote Job May Help AI Replace You

Firms that embraced remote work early are adopting AI faster and relying on new remote hires less than peers that didn’t

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of workers mastered the use of new technology tools to keep businesses running while offices were closed. And for many, many workers and businesses, all that Zooming, Slacking and Zapier tracking paid off. Millions of workers really like remote work now, and some 4 in 10 jobs nationwide are remote or hybrid positions.     

But in dutifully adopting all that tech, remote workers may have unwittingly paved the way for employers to fully automate their jobs, according to a working paper by UCLA Anderson’s Gregor Schubert. Companies that heavily invested in remote work during the pandemic are now adopting generative AI faster than similar firms that didn’t, his study observes. And they are cutting back on remote hiring now faster than other firms. 

Schubert suggests that an “organizational technology ladder” — his name for a relatively new concept — allows firms that adopt one technology to benefit more from subsequent innovations. For example, companies that issued employees laptops and set up secure server networks before the pandemic had a head start on getting remote workers up and running when it hit. Over time, the theory suggests, early adoptions can compound into bigger and bigger advantages over competitors that are slow to invest in new tech. 

 In this case, he suggests, the experience of building infrastructure for remote work during COVID-19 gave early adopters an edge on integrating AI and reaping its productivity gains. Firms that front-loaded remote workers and related tech also hired more experienced workers in decision-making roles to manage it, the study suggests. By the time ChatGPT rolled out in late 2022, these employers already had much of the talent and processes needed to quickly incorporate AI.  

Now, those early adopters appear to be using AI to replace remote jobs faster than in-office positions. Nationwide, postings for remote and hybrid jobs started declining right around the time ChatGPT was released, according to Schubert’s data. 

A Prequel for Job Cuts?

It is rare that two paradigm-shifting innovations seriously disrupt industry within one decade. Remote work and generative AI blew up offices less than three years apart. 

Schubert suggests these two phenomena are linked events that continually affect each other. Remote work complements AI adoption, while AI eats into demand for remote work. 

Using employment data and job postings between 2010 and 2024, Schubert observes companies embracing remote work during the pandemic also created in-office jobs to lead and assist those teams after lockdowns ended. For example, they hired proportionately more information processing experts, as well as managers with specific communication and team building skills. 

Those nonremote hires also possessed skills that would shortly be needed for AI adoption. When ChatGPT came online, firms that had used the remote work experiment to build up on-site tech and management skills moved fastest to incorporate AI, according to the data. 

Schubert notes several other findings that suggest these proactive steps eventually reduced the need for the remote jobs they were initially created to support. 

• Remote workers already use more AI tech in their jobs than in-office workers, a sign that their jobs are more vulnerable to AI takeovers than nonremote jobs.

• Occupations and companies that have a lot of remote workers are adopting AI at the highest rates. 

• Among companies with many susceptible jobs — coding or routine writing, for example — remote postings declined about 19% after the release of ChatGPT. Remote postings by firms with less susceptible jobs were little changed.

Vulnerable Jobs

The most immediately expendable employees in the AI revolution are those that do routine, highly computer-based jobs that require little creativity and require little contact with other humans; i.e., jobs often done remotely. Data entry, coding, routine writing, accounting and scheduling jobs are examples. 

Those team builders, communications managers, data scientists and machine learning specialists hired as part of the remote work boom have more job security during the AI revolution, Schubert writes. These kinds of jobs require high-level decision-making, supervising skills or a physical presence. Jobs heavy on customer or colleague interactions also are harder to automate.

Just knowing how heavily your company relies on remote workers may be a clue to how vulnerable your own remote job is to extinction, Schubert’s work suggests. Companies heavily dependent on remote workers now are most eager to invest in AI, and more of those AI tools are going into remote jobs. As AI learns to fulfill the remaining human responsibilities in those jobs, the need, or even the desire, for a wage-earning human to do it wanes. AI is faster … and always available.