Training a model once and then putting it to work will be vastly cheaper than hiring thousands of employees.
Accenture had 750k employees last I checked. A 10% reduction in headcount would mean saving billions annually.
How much compute does an annual $3B budget buy?
At some point, if all firms participate in this, the decrease in demand would cause the benefits of white collar labor replacement to diminish to 0, no?
Or, perhaps, firms with goods broadly consumed by (relatively) irreplaceable blue collar labor would have a competitive advantage in such an environment and would be able to benefit more from white collar labor replacement. Hmm.
But we'll have to invent new means to entertain and subjugate each other.
CEOs have all the incentive in the world to overspend on AI adoption.
Example: the Great Depression as farmers all were in a race to the bottom due to automation, laying off farmhands and producting a glut of products. The US government had to step in and pay them not to plant, thereby breaking the downward spiral of everyone acting in their own individual self-interest.
LLMs would be an overkill
But that's not the same as reducing headcount.
Perhaps it's 1-2% in a large org and 0% an a small org.
But if everyone has too much work all the time, it won't make much difference either.