Raphael Thys
Florence Fu/Tech Insider
- Generative AI is making it easier to work multiple jobs at the same time.
- AI tools will lift earnings from multiple jobs by at least $83 billion by 2030, Morgan Stanley says.
- Multi-earning in the US has increased 11% in the past year, the bank's survey work found.
If AI can do some of your job, why not take another one on the side?
That's the thinking behind a big new study released this week by researchers at Morgan Stanley.
The investment bank conducted surveys in several countries, including the US, UK, and India, to get a sense for how many people have or plan to take on multiple jobs or set up multiple earnings streams in other ways.
Official data tracked by Morgan Stanley shows 5% of the population working multiple jobs, with that growing 5% a year. Unofficial data suggests it's more like 8-10% of the population, with interest in multiple jobs growing more than 18% a year, the bank's researchers wrote in a note to clients.
The bank conducted a similar study about a year ago, and since then the multi-job trends has picked up, with the rise of generative AI powering the change.
"The main driver which has changed since our original thesis is the advent of cheap or free and rapidly democratised access to generative AI tools," the researchers wrote.
They forecast $400 billion in income from multiple jobs by 2030, with generative AI contributing about $83 billion of that. In a much more bullish scenario, the bank sees $1.4 trillion in multi-earning income, with generative AI kicking in $300 billion of that.
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A chart from a Morgan Stanley reportAlphaWise/Morgan Stanley Research
There's been an explosion of AI tools in the past year, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4 from OpenAI, Bard and underlying AI models from Google, Claude 2 from Anthropic, and Midjourney. These services can answer questions convincingly, generate images on command, complete software code, and perform a host of other tasks.
With these new tools, employees suddenly have ways of producing work more quickly than before, making it easier to juggle multiple jobs. Morgan Stanley noted a 14% lift in call center productivity and a 55% boost for writing code, as examples.
Side hustles where generative AI can help include affiliate marketing, e-commerce dropshipping, content creation, tutoring, graphic and web design, programming, and renting rooms or other space, according to Morgan Stanley.
In content creation and e-commerce, 37% and 34% of respondents respectively said their income had been boosted with the help of generative AI tools.
The average multi-earner is making $8.50 an hour when using generative AI, and $7 an hour without the technology, Morgan Stanley's surveys found.
Multi-earning in the US has increased 11% in the past year, the survey work also found.