Whenever a new technology emerges and starts disrupting the world, it boosts the excitement levels of tech enthusiasts and creates fear in others. The reason behind this fear is how these technological innovations will impact the job landscape, whether it will help you or make you completely obsolete from the job market.

The same situation took place in the world, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, when the AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT was born and surpassed 100 million users in the first two months. ChatGPT’s creators, OpenAI, said they’d invested greatly in this technology, intending to make it revolutionary. Hence, its unstoppable.

Moreover, Kaspersky’s 2022 survey shows that 48% of people in Saudi Arabia fear losing their jobs to AI and ChatGPT. This fear is not unfounded, as AI and ChatGPT are already doing an amazing job of automating tasks that humans once did.

Industries ranging from customer service to financial analytics and every other are now rushing to launch products built entirely on ChatGPT.

Also, when the International Labour Organization estimates that 208 million people will be unemployed in 2023, will this new wave of Artificial intelligence significantly intensify joblessness in KSA? Which jobs would AI tools potentially replace? Would ChatGPT and AI go to Impact Saudi Workforce Productivity? Let’s break it down!

The State of the Saudi Workforce Before AI: A Run-through 

Here’s what the Saudi Arab’s job market looked like before AI:

Expatriate Labour Market

Before the advent of AI, major Saudi industries, including healthcare, retail, and construction, heavily relied on expatriate labor. They alone made up about 75% of the total Saudi workforce. KSA’s high dependence on foreign labor was due to several reasons, including:

• Lack of killed Saudi Workforce 

Back then, the Saudi education system couldn’t produce highly skilled workers. At that time, the Saudi government was more focused on religious education instead of promoting vocational training. Also, the student dropout rate was so high it eventually led to limited job opportunities for Saudi nationals.

• Inflation 

Inflation made it hard for Saudi citizens to find affordable living and fulfill their basic necessities. It led many of them to take on low-paying jobs and not fully utilize their skills. At that time, hiring skilled foreign labor was the only choice.

• Perks and Benefits

Saudi labor was deprived of the generous benefits offered only to foreign laborers, such as free housing, medical care, and transportation. It made it difficult for Saudi workers to compete for jobs.

Labor-Intensive Industries

While technology integration was minimal, Saudi Arabia’s industrial landscape was dominated by manual practices. Sectors like construction, oil and gas, and manufacturing were highly labor-intensive and relied on traditional methods. It affected productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 

The rise of AI in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can be traced back to the early 2010s when the Saudi government planned to invest heavily in the latest technologies and utilize AI at the top of their list. The goal was to make KSA a global leader in Artificial Intelligence by 2030.

To achieve its goal, Saudi Arabia launched the Saudi Vision 2030 – the country’s transformation plan that will diversify its economy while minimizing its reliance on oil. AI plays a major role in this transformation plan, helping the kingdom build a future-ready economy.

The introduction of AI into the Saudi business realm has the potential to address all those problems that once look impossible to solve. Businesses in the oil-rich country are now readily investing in AI-powered solutions and services to unlock productivity, gain competitive advantage, and meet evolving customer needs.

Also, with the emergence of Large language models (LLM), the AI hype is at an all-time high and real, and its adoption is gaining traction more than ever before in the kingdom.

Moreover, the country plans to attract investments, create thousands of new jobs and enhance its economy through AI.

According to a 2022 survey by ManageEngine, 97% of business decision-makers in Saudi Arabia reported that their organization had invested in AI and machine learning. Of these, 61% said they used AI to prevent cybersecurity attacks.

The following are the percentage of each industry using AI in KSA:

Whats more, Saudi Arabia aspires to transform its workforce by training and developing a pool of 20,000 AI and data specialists and experts, of whom 5,000 will be equipped with strong skills and highly qualified in line with the National Strategy for Data & AI.

Exploring the Influence of ChatGPT and AI on Saudi Workforce Productivity

With already disrupting the world with its breakthrough solutions, AI has the potential to add 215 billion Riyals to the Saudi economy by 2035, as per new studies. And since KSA has a good source of human capital, it’s quite a smooth sail for them to build a tech-based economy.

AI has created a wave of change in the global workforce that could turn out to be a significant tool for Saudi Arabia’s manpower to boost economic development.

If we talk about workforce productivity, AI can positively impact the human workforce instead of replacing it. In addition to that, it can improve performance and minimize the cost of internal processes.

Let’s see what more amazing things AI and chatGPT can do:

Uplift Recruitment and Hiring

If you belong to a Human Resource team, AI, specifically ChatGPT, can positively impact recruitment and hiring processes. It smooths training and development processes, upskilling and reskilling, and talent collaboration tasks.

AI can help you make customized training programs for employees and online courses, which will boost collaboration and communication among team members and the kingdom’s workforce.

Automates Repetitive Tasks

ChatGPT can amazingly help the workforce to become more productive in their respective domains with increased efficiency as it can automate mundane and repetitive tasks, leaving workers with more time to focus on strategic activities.

Kaspersky’s survey results back this up. It says that 50% of employees believe that AI increases productivity, and 51% believe that robots can open significant opportunities for them to get better jobs.

Improve Healthcare Sector

AI can greatly transform the Saudi healthcare sector by providing patients with personalized treatment for chronic diseases. What’s more, it can help medical professionals predetermine the outcomes as well as enhance diagnosis processes.

Optimize Transportation

AI can optimize shipping routes and ensure timely commutes or logistics delivery. By utilizing Traffic patterns, it can enable intelligent traffic signals operations and ensure smooth traffic flows in the least disruptive manner.

Innovations in the Energy Sector

AI-powered solutions can help identify where you can explore oil and gas, pinpoint those activities using certain algorithms, and produce accurate results.

The labor market of the oil-rich country is experiencing one of the world’s most rapid transformations only because of Artificial Intelligence. Besides this, it can bring innovation in almost every sector, including retail, finance, customer service, fashion, construction, etc.

The Flip Side 

For AI globally, regulations and data privacy are the major challenges. Despite chatGPT and AI’s enormous capabilities, it poses some major risks — so it is crucial to keep in mind that its capabilities can be leveraged effectively with human expertise and oversight. The amazing combination of Human intelligence and breakthrough AI-powered technologies can give rise to significant advancements and innovations across multiple domains.