Will you be replaced by AI?

There’s a research list that’s hard to stop reading once you start. American economists have gone through hundreds of jobs and given each a measure of how exposed it is to AI, that is, how much of the work the technology could, in principle, do. The measure is called AIOE, and the list is a rollercoaster for your self-esteem.

At the top: actuaries, budget analysts, buyers, people who analyse, calculate, and draft things for others. At the bottom, by a wide margin: dancers and aerobics instructors. The same technology that drafts contracts in seconds still can’t do a single push-up.

So if you’re reading this at an office, you’ve probably already found your own job on the list and felt a little chill. That’s the list’s fault, because it answers the wrong question.

Being exposed doesn’t mean being replaced

If a job is exposed, it means AI can do parts of the work, not that someone has decided it should take over. Between those two things lies everything that actually decides the outcome: who controls the tool, who’s responsible for the results, and whether the employer has built something thoughtful with the technology or just let it seep in unchecked.

Take the actuary at the top of the list. In one workplace, she’s the person who lets the AI generate a week’s worth of calculations in a morning and spends the rest of her time on the judgements that need her twenty years of experience. In another workplace, the AI does the same work in secret, on someone’s personal account, until one day a manager wonders what the department is even for. Same job, same exposure, two completely different outcomes. The difference was never the list ranking. It was the workplace.

It’s workplaces that decide, not jobs

That’s why at EuroWork we keep talking about visibility rather than just technology. When AI work happens out in the open, something happens that the list can’t measure: every AI response is labelled as an AI response, so it’s clear what the machine did and what the human did, and the latter is what gets negotiated into pay. What an AI agent does leaves a record and waits for a human to approve it, so the responsibility, and the value, stays with the person who approved it. The cost is shown next to every answer, so a manager sees what the technology does for the money instead of guessing what it’s doing to the headcount.

The person who works like this isn’t the one being compared to the machine. She’s the one driving it, and that job isn’t on any extinction list.

The answer to the headline’s question

Will you be replaced by AI? Wrong question, asked to the wrong person. The right question goes to your employer: will you make AI work visible and responsible, so it strengthens your people, or let it happen in secret until no one remembers who could do what?

Your employees are already using AI, even the highly exposed ones, maybe especially them. Do you know what they’re sharing with it?

Source

The exposure measure AIOE comes from the research paper Occupational Heterogeneity in Exposure to Generative AI by Felten, Raj, and Seamans.