Wharton’s great contrarian says AI adoption isn’t an easy way to cut headcount: ‘The key thing … is just how much work is involved in doing it’

If the current frenzy over artificial intelligence feels familiar to Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor professor of management at the Wharton School, it’s because he’s seen this movie before. He points to the period between 2015 and 2017, when major consultancies and the World Economic Forum confidently predicted that driverless trucks would eliminate truck drivers within a few years.

“You didn’t have to think very long to realize that just wasn’t going to make sense in practice,”...