After the Bell: Turns out, the machines are going to take our jobs. Great.

This year, the report that caught my eye was the Future of Jobs report, which is normally released once every two years. The report surveyed more than 1,000 employers – representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters in 55 economies. It’s a monster.

As you might expect, generative AI is the absolutely overwhelming topic of the report. 

Saadia Zahidi, WEF managing director, says this in the introduction: “Transformational breakthroughs, particularly in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), are reshaping industries and tasks across all sectors. These technological advances, however, are converging with a broader array of challenges, including economic volatility, geo-economic realignments, environmental challenges and evolving societal expectations.” 

That’s WEF-speak for the proposition that AI is gonna rock our world – as if we didn’t know it already. 

That uncontestable proposition invites the question: Which part of the world will be rocked the most? And, of course, am I going to get rocked totally out of my job and land on my arse? 

Here are some of the answers to those questions. First, to the obvious question, which technology is driving transformation, the answer is the obvious:



To the question of which jobs are going to grow, the answer is also pretty obvious, but the extent of the increase still surprised me.



And the jobs you don’t want to be in? Not good news for, say, post office workers, which to me is curious. But it is disturbing for this news worker that news workers appear tenth on the list of top-declining jobs. Overall, the report suggests that, on a global average, the core skills of 39% of all jobs are likely to change in the next five years. Yowzer. Best you start working on that side hustle.



And while we are looking at the depressing news, take a look at this graph which shows that of the 15 percentage point reduction in total work tasks delivered by humans, nearly 82% is attributable to advancing automation. While 19% is projected to derive from expanded human-machine collaboration. In other words, yes, the machines are taking over. 



There is also an interesting survey question about what is holding transformation back. Look at this graph produced by the news service Semafor, based on the report. The report asks the same question of all countries, but this is just a comparison between the issues facing South Africa and the US for illustrative purposes: 



It’s interesting to me that the biggest differentiator is concerns around the skills gap. If this is true, something is wrong. South African companies pour huge amounts of money into closing the skills gap and yet they just don’t seem to be making headway. And that, more than anything else, is holding back transformation. 

So, since the prognosis (according to this report, at least) is that the machines – AI mostly – are going to take our jobs, is the overall outlook pessimistic? Not at all; the nature of jobs will change, very fast. But over the next five years, the report projects that 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million jobs displaced. That constitutes a structural labour market churn of 22% of the 1.2 billion formal jobs in the study dataset. 

And that amounts to a net employment increase of 7%, or 78 million jobs. Whew! Do we believe all this? Not necessarily; these are survey results from a subset of global employers after all. But my sense, for what it’s worth, is that it does more or less reflect reality. DM