Blackstone’s Jon Gray Sees AI Creating ‘Huge Boom’ in Blue Collar Jobs

(Bloomberg) — Blackstone Inc. Its chairman, Jon Gray, has said the boom in artificial intelligence will lead to a surge in blue-collar employment as asset managers like his spend billions of dollars on data centers and other infrastructure.

QTS, for example, a data center operator backed by Blackstone, will have 40,000 people on sites across the country by the end of the year, Gray said. That’s up from more than 10,000 just a year ago.

“This certainly means a huge boom in blue-collar employment over the next 5 years,” Gray said during a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference. “Where those jobs are may vary; the middle of the country is where a lot of this physical investment is happening.”

Gray’s comments come as the rapid build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure across the country has triggered fears that the technology could one day replace large numbers of jobs. A recent report from Boston Consulting Group found that AI could cause 15 percent of jobs to disappear in the next five years; But a much larger portion will be reshaped by technology alone, he said.

Franklin Resources Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jenny Johnson also weighed in on the discussion, arguing that new jobs could be created as more people take up artificial intelligence and come up with use cases.

“None of us are that good at using these tools yet,” he said during the same panel. “When you get these tools into people’s hands, we’ll see that there are so many more things we never realized we needed and suddenly we can’t live without.”

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