Work

"That only affects IT." No. It affects everything that gets done with and at a computer.

AI doesn't replace an industry. It replaces tasks. And most of them sit outside IT.

“That only affects IT.” The line falls reliably whenever AI comes up. And it rarely comes from IT. It comes from accounting, from insurance, from the law office, from the public authority. From people who never thought of their work as IT and therefore assume the whole thing has nothing to do with them.

Yet one look at your own working day is enough. A case comes in. Someone reads it, checks it against rules, compares it with similar cases, writes a reply, a draft, a ruling. Text in, text out. Nobody would call that IT. It’s office work. And it’s exactly the kind of work a language model can take over. Tasks of this sort sit on almost every desk in the country.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Vulnerability grows with qualification. Earlier waves of automation hit the factory floor. This wave hits the office, and within the office it hits first the well-paid work you studied years for. The bricklayer isn’t first on the list. His tax adviser is.

Even those who don’t get replaced feel the shift. People who use AI clear more cases per day. People who don’t look slow by comparison. The bar moves long before anyone is laid off. And it moves fastest where nobody expected it: in jobs that thought of themselves as far from AI.

The line “but I don’t work in tech” describes a world where IT was a special discipline, its own department at the end of the corridor. That world has been gone for decades. IT is not one industry among others. It is the layer everything else runs on. Anyone who makes their decisions at a computer works on that layer. Whether or not it says so on the business card.

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In depth

Jobs nobody would file under IT

Architecture in the design phase. Translation. First-pass reads in medical diagnostics. Prep and grading in teaching. Routine reports in journalism. Marketing. Phone-based customer support. CV pre-screening in HR. Legal research. Insurance claims handling. Tax advice. Bookkeeping. Case processing in almost any public authority.

The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 names the fastest-shrinking jobs in absolute numbers: office and secretarial staff, cashiers, and ticket clerks. In percentage terms, postal workers, bank tellers, and data-entry clerks shrink the fastest. None of these jobs belong to IT.

Those are the roles disappearing already today. The OECD Employment Outlook 2023 measures something different: which tasks AI will be able to take over in future. There the picture flips. The most exposed are the highly qualified desk jobs. Managers, finance professionals, lawyers, scientists.

The numbers, in case you have doubts

The OECD rates roughly 27 percent of jobs in its member countries as highly automatable. Goldman Sachs reached a similar finding in 2023: for about two thirds of all jobs in the US and the EU, AI can take over parts of the work. In total the bank considers about a quarter of all tasks automatable. McKinsey projects 27 to 30 percent automatable working hours by 2030, depending on the region. Not 30 percent of jobs. 30 percent of the hours, spread across almost every desk task.

The WEF report 2025 expects 92 million displaced and 170 million new jobs worldwide by 2030. A net gain. But the new jobs demand different qualifications, often appear in different regions, and go to different people than those whose jobs vanish.

A field experiment by Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond with 5,179 customer-service workers showed this: AI assistance raises productivity by 14 percent on average, and by 34 percent for newcomers. That sounds like good news for the newcomers. For the team it means the same amount of work needs fewer heads.

Who is safe for now, and why only for now

Jobs with a high physical or interpersonal share are protected for the moment: care work, skilled trades, construction, cleaning, logistics, hospitality. The WEF report even sees the largest absolute employment growth here, because the population is ageing and the physical world doesn't run by itself.

But every business in these sectors carries an administrative layer: billing, ordering, staff scheduling, tax returns, dealings with the authorities. That layer is exposed. The care service stays, the back office shrinks. The building contractor stays, the job costing moves into the software.

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