Artificial intelligence would not replace human jobs but can only reshape work by automating tasks, said leading business executives from technology companies at the ongoing World Economic Forum 2026 in Davos.
Kian Katanforoosh, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Workera, said language matters when describing AI.
“Personally, I’m not a fan of calling AI agents or co-workers,” he told a WEF session, arguing that AI excels at tasks but can’t outperform humans at “entire jobs.” Humans, by contrast, perform “hundreds of tasks at times.” “Predictions that AI would wholesale replace jobs have so far been wrong,” he added.
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Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, agreed that AI will augment human employees at a massive scale rather than replace them. He forecast a future of “8 billion people and 80 billion AIs,” saying most systems will enable new use cases rather than replacing existing human roles.
He pointed to an AI system that called thousands of people during a heatwave, guiding them to cooler locations and offering health advice. Getting it right required rigorous testing. “We have models that check models that check models,” he said.
Kate Kallot, Founder and CEO of Amini, said AI firmly remains a “tool” that cannot make value-based decisions. It “can’t choose the best outcomes” because it doesn’t yet have the right inputs, Kallot said.
Christoph Schweizer, CEO of BCG, said the experience of working with AI can feel like collaborating with a co-worker. “You are now in a reality where it feels like a co-worker, whether you call it that or not,” he said.
Schweizer argued that success depends on how companies change their organizations, not just their tools. “They will succeed if they really change how their people work,” he said. He urged that AI be treated as “a CEO problem” that cannot be delegated.
Enrique Lores, President and Chief Executive Officer of HP, urged balance in AI usage, with restraint in being more demanding of AI co-workers than of human employees.
In HP’s call centres, AI sometimes gives the wrong answer; yet overall accuracy is higher than before, and customer satisfaction has improved, he added.
