ING survey shows Dutch CEOs brace for AI-driven job reshaping

This ING snapshot is a useful barometer of how fast executive sentiment around AI is hardening. When a quarter of large-company leaders say they’re certain AI will replace jobs—and three-quarters expect to recoup their AI investments within two years—you’re looking at an adoption environment that will aggressively probe the capabilities of current and near-future models. That doesn’t automatically accelerate the path to AGI, but it does increase the volume of real-world deployments that expose edge cases, failure modes, and opportunities for model improvement.

The survey also highlights a key nuance in the automation debate: leaders expect about 25% of roles to change, not simply vanish. IT, R&D, and sales are precisely the functions where frontier models are already strong—coding, analytics, content generation, and decision support. As those teams get flooded with AI tools, their feedback loops into vendors and cloud providers will shape the product roadmaps of the very companies building frontier systems. In practice, that means enterprise demand will continue to push for more autonomy, better tool use, and deeper integration into core workflows.

For the AI race, widespread executive confidence in near-term ROI is a green light for continued capital spending on models and infrastructure. The risk is that organizations optimize for cost-cutting before robustness, potentially normalizing brittle automation in critical business functions.