AI is rapidly expanding the workforce and creating fear of employment crisis as workers and people joining the workforce try to grasp whether their careers are in the chopping block.
That quick pace is supported by new data. As a result, people are trying to find “AI Prevention” jobs as businesses around the world choose to automate tasks instead of hiring new workers.
While it is not possible to say clearly which occupations are 100% AI proof and which occupations are automated, recent Microsoft research and findings can shed light on this issue.
A Microsoft survey published last month measured how AI can productively apply it to common tasks in a variety of jobs.
From January 2024 to September 2024, Microsoft researchers analyzed anonymized conversations from the company's search engine chatbot, Bing Copilot, to see “tasks users perform on public, public, free and use AI chatbots.”
The study then developed the “AI Applicability Score” for these jobs. This has developed numbers that represent the work activities people most sought for AI support, how successful these tasks were, and the combinations that most sought for AI support in their range of shocks.
There is a warning
The study shows which occupations can and cannot be automated, but Microsoft says it doesn't necessarily mean that those jobs will be eliminated.
The AI Application Score emphasizes that “AI can change the way we work, not taking away or interacting with it,” a Microsoft representative told Gizmodo earlier this month.
“Our research shows that AI supports many tasks, particularly tasks that involve research, writing and communication, but it does not show that it can fully perform a single occupation,” Microsoft said.
The data also does not mean that employment with a high AI applicability score will have higher wages thanks to AI uptake, as the data does not include “an impact on new technology downstream businesses.”
Learn more about the predictive effects of AI on Gizmodo's corporate world.
Why businesses automate
Microsoft believes that instead of using AI to fully automate these jobs, they can augment them.
But is that what business executives want? It's difficult to make a blanket statement about it, but early signs suggest that executives may be more pro-promoting than not.
Increasingly, executives from the corporate world are expressing their hopes and desires that AI wants to cut costs across the workplace. The news naturally led to a slower job loss, particularly as Microsoft research shows, affecting early career workers in the white-collar field where AI poses the biggest threat.
“Artificial intelligence replaces literal half of all white-collar workers in the United States,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said last month at the Aspen Idea Festival.
Several executives have also already implemented new employment policies, asking managers to explain why AI agents cannot play their role before they advance hiring new workers.
It doesn't mean you should
AI can reduce labor costs and increase profits for businesses. But that's not yet the case of wholesale automation.
AI can automate some of these jobs, but that doesn't mean that it can do a great job.
For example, Microsoft says writers are in the top 10 for the best AI applicability. However, AI-generated writing has been much more widely criticized for its rich copyright issues, particularly as AI provides works by existing human authors and “creates” new works.
The disruption in the labor market, which is supposed to follow the automation of certain employment, should also be a source of concern.
Former Google executive Mo Gawdat said earlier this month that he believes this AI-driven labor issue is one of several aspects of how it can approach AI that leads to short-term dystopia over the next 15 years.
Like the Microsoft researchers who worked on this study, many other experts argue that increasing AI into a particular field is a better way to fuse AI into the economy for increased productivity than automation.
So what is your job?
Here is what is most likely to be a human being, the study states:
10. Tire repair companies and changers
9. Ship Engineer
8. Automotive Glass Installers and Repairs
7. Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
6. Plant and System Operators
5. Embryo,
4. Helper Painter, Plasterer
3. Dangerous material removal workers
2. Nursing assistant
1. phlebotomists (aka, a medical professional trained to collect blood samples)
AI works with data. So it's not surprising that the list overwhelmingly includes healthcare industry jobs and blue-collar jobs.
AI adoption is also particularly slow, especially in the healthcare industry, due to limited data sets. Due to strict regulations, less than 10% of surgical data are published.
The most risky job
Microsoft also considered a job that it thought had the highest level of AI applicability. These are, rather, not surprising, professions and sales roles in knowledge work, and AI is already rapidly incorporated.
Here is a list of the top 10 jobs with the highest level of AI applicability:
10. Broadcast announcer and radio DJ
9. Ticket Agents and Travelers
8. Telephone Operator
7. CNC Tool Programmer
6. Customer Service Representative
5. Authors and authors
4. Service Sales Representative
3. Passenger attendance
2. Historian
1. Interpreters and translators
