At the recently concluded world economic forum, it was stated that AI would take away 14 million jobs in the next 5 years and that 44% of today's technology personnel need to upgrade their skills. Do you agree?

It is hard to predict exact numbers, but I agree that people across all industries should upgrade their skillsets around AI. Things WILL be changing to some extent.

Recent statements by headlines seem to indicate where we could be going:

- Jeffrey Katzenberg Dreamworks founder -  "Generative artificial intelligence will cut the cost of animated films by 90 percent"

- Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI’s Sora: “Jobs Are Going to Be Lost”

- Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people

Granted these are "shock" headlines, but we have to approach the future with a flexible strategy and mindset of "What if?"

In our business, we are consulting clients, pretty much, full time on this topic, because they all are asking these same questions and making plans.

Continuous skill enhancement isn't just a response; it's the cornerstone of a successful technologist's journey. AI will accelerate this journey, and I don't know if 14 million jobs will be displaced but a high number of roles will be and have already been affected.

Yes but only if businesses make it happen. Automation and AI can already remove or augment roles at scale. Transformations dirty secret is that people block mass change. They want speedy answers, won’t redesign their businesses or workflows or block change. Can roles be replaced? Yes. Will they? Probably but not at the scale or pace we might enjoy. 

I don't see it taking away that many job but it might require retraining or skilling for some roles while enhancing others. 

 I can't agree because, well, I wouldn't even know how to do those maths. 

BUT...

- Low level jobs will be replaced by mid to high-level job that leverage AI. We don't have secretaries typing letters for us, we write our emails ourselves. This is the same thing. 
- white collar workers that don't use AI will be replaced by white collars workers that use AI
- When 10 people were needed, now 1-3 will suffice plus 1-3 low level admin/data entry ones

For instance: translation used to be 100% human based. With Neural Translation, this isn't needed anymore. Anyone can go to MS Word hit "review > translate document" and you're almost golden. You just need a person in the target language to sanity check the translation as it's good enough to be understood in most case. So instead of one human translator, we have a target-language specialist (e.g. a marketing manager in Germany checking the German automatic translation of an English brochure). 

So, yes, lots of changes coming, low-level or easy to automate tasks or jobs will disappear.