With AI’s advancing capabilities and widespread adoption, there has been ongoing debate about its impact on the labour market, particularly whether it is beginning to supplant human labour. According to an IMF study, 60% of jobs in advanced economies are exposed to AI1. Of these, half are expected to be negatively impacted, while half stand to benefit from higher productivity from AI integration or augmentation. On a global scale, nearly 40% of all jobs are likely to be affected as the technology is increasingly assimilated in business processes.
Areas and roles involving tasks such as coding, language understanding, and logical reasoning are likely to be more impacted. For example, according to the recent AI Index Report released by Stanford University2, AI systems in 2023 could solve just 4.4% of coding problems on SWEBench, a widely used benchmark for software engineering, but performance increased to 71.7% in 2024.
Uneven impact on the workforce
Jobs like data entry, scheduling and the elements of customer service which entail repetitive data processing face near-term obsolescence as AI’s accuracy and scalability improve. Other jobs that involve innovation with a fair bit of complexity such as breakthrough R&D could be more resilient (albeit AI will increasingly be involved). AI is also likely to struggle when it comes to replicating roles that require emotional intelligence, human trust and navigating ambiguity.
Based on company-level analysis by Seyed Hosseini and Guy Lichtinger at Harvard University, early evidence suggests that AI adoption at the workplace has coincided with a material decline in junior hires, while senior employment remains unchanged. The decline in entry level roles is concentrated in occupations highly exposed to generative AI, with low-exposure occupations less impacted. This could mean that AI’s widespread adoption may shift work away from entry-level tasks, potentially narrowing the bottom rungs of internal career ladders.