An AI agent costs less than a skilled worker. For the welfare state, it is a total write-off.
What companies save is what the public loses.
A few months ago we automated part of our app development. Work that used to take developer hours now runs across several AI agents that split the tasks between them: one plans, others write code, others again check and test the result directly in the app. What comes out at the end is code that can go straight into production. No human involved.
When a company replaces a skilled worker with an AI agent, its personnel costs drop. That is the obvious calculation. The less obvious one: that same position used to transfer income tax, social insurance and municipal levies to the public. Of the gross salary of a 60,000-euro position, around 62 percent flows into the public sector as levies (employee and employer side combined), about 37,000 euros a year per position. The agent pays none of it.
It also does not consume. That sounds like a footnote, but it isn’t. What employees take home as wages, they spend again: at the baker, the restaurant, the hairdresser. That is where the next payslips come from, with levies hanging off them too. Every euro paid out turns over about one and a half times in the domestic economy before it drains away. The agent, by contrast, is billed in euros, but the subscription fee goes to OpenAI or Anthropic in Ireland and from there, tax-optimised, on to the US. The money does not just leave the payslip, it leaves the country.
Our tax system was built over the past seventy years around one assumption: that productive work is done by people, and that wherever value is created, a payslip appears. As long as the assumption held, everything the public needs was payable: pensions, hospitals, schools, police, courts, roads. Now software is taking over a growing share of that value creation. And where software works, no wage is attached. The public loses twice. The levies at the start of the chain, and the consumption at the end.
We need to talk about this
The full bill
Assume a gross annual salary of 60,000 euros as a salaried employee, 14 monthly payments, no children, no commuter allowance, 2026 tax schedule. Total employer cost is around 77,900 euros, that is gross pay plus roughly 30 percent in ancillary wage costs (about 17,900 euros in employer levies).
Of that, around 36,900 euros goes to the public purse: roughly 10,900 in employee social insurance (18.07 percent), roughly 8,100 in income tax (the effective burden after the one-sixth tax break and the transport deduction), and roughly 17,900 in employer levies (employer social insurance, municipal tax of 3 percent, employer contribution to the FLAF of 3.7 percent, the DB surcharge of 0.38 percent, employee provision of 1.53 percent).
That comes to 47 percent of the total employer cost, or around 62 percent of the gross salary. For every thousand positions replaced, the public loses around 37 million euros a year.
How does this look in Germany and Switzerland?
Germany is even more exposed than Austria through its social contributions (around 40 percent of gross pay, employer and employee shares combined). Switzerland has a much lower contribution rate through its AHV and pension funds, and makes up for it through direct taxation at the federal, cantonal and municipal level.
Structurally, all three face the same problem: the tax base hangs on the payslip, and the payslip is becoming rarer.