Du Lan talks to reporters at the ongoing 2019 Smart China Expo in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality on Monday. Photo: Chu Daye/G

The impact of AI on the job market may be less severe than people may have thought, a senior executive at Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company iFlytek said, depicting scenarios of people working together with AI-powered machines.

"As AI joins the workforce, a lot of new jobs will be generated to enable AI, such as data annotators," Du Lan, Senior Vice President of iFlytek, told the Global Times on the sidelines of the ongoing 2019 Smart China Expo (SCE) in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

There will also be scenarios in which human workers form a coupled relationship with machines, with each doing a part in which the other cannot excel. 

The comments were made as Chinese Vice Premier Liu He floated the idea of AI emerging as a key growth driver for the Chinese economy, which is currently experiencing a shift in economic growth momentum and upgrading to high-quality growth from high-speed growth.

Industries related to AI have grown in importance in China, with an initial survey suggesting that the scale of China's AI-related industries reached roughly 500 billion yuan ($70.5 billion) in 2018. 

The Chinese Vice Premier is aware of the potential impact that AI may have on the job market, saying that AI will increase jobs through increased investment and consumption, but will also impact traditional jobs. He also noted that the Chinese government will work to strike a balance between the two impacts.

"The coupling of humans and machines could be one of the new work models of the future," Du said. "Machines will do the simple, repetitious tasks, while humans work closely with the machines to do the more creative tasks."

"The AI of today can only do jobs that are well defined with boundaries, and its coupled humans can do jobs without boundaries. Their coupling will result in a huge improvement in productivity," said Du, noting that a whole new category of jobs will be generated this way.

The impact of AI in job creation was also mentioned by other delegates attending the 2019 SCE.

Chinese business magnate Jack Ma Yun said during a key note speech on Monday that as the remote and underdeveloped Guizhou Province in Southwest China develops a digital economy, many impoverished people actually became the first batch of certified data annotators in China.