The number of AI job offers is increasing at a rate 3.5 times faster than overall recruitment offers.
Artificial Intelligence and Work: An Inevitable Shared Future
Artificial Intelligence already impacts the world of work, employment, and organizations, and will do so even more in the future.
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Skills at the Heart of the Matter
Concerns about AI’s impact on employment focus primarily on the risk of job destruction rather than job creation opportunities. Yet AI skills are central: it is essential to both develop training curricula for future workers’ professions while supporting the transformation of current workers’ roles. It is crucial to anticipate this shift, balancing learning and adaptation, or even “enhancement” of skills across all aspects: design, programming, deployment, field implementation, maintenance—while identifying key sectors.
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A Broader Shift in the Relationship with Work
Beyond individual professions, the overall organization of companies and productive structures—whether industrial or service-based—is affected. It is necessary to define new interactions between people and AI systems. Will they facilitate automated and tedious tasks and increase productivity? But how do we compare machine productivity to human productivity? Tensions surrounding AI system deployment can lead to challenging situations for the work community and its management.
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The challenges of AI adoption in the workplace and employment sector must be integrated into social and technological dialogue.
The potential for AI augmentation is considered greater than its automation potential, affecting a wide range of tasks across various types of jobs. Overall, nearly seven out of ten business leaders recognize the necessity for their workforce to acquire new skills to effectively leverage generative AI.
Today, adoption rates vary, with large enterprises leading the way while smaller ones are still in the exploration phase. Globally, it is projected that 75% of enterprises will have adopted AI by 2027, with 59% of them anticipating its growing importance in their business strategies. AI is increasingly used in recruitment processes, performance management, conflict resolution, and workforce reduction initiatives across various sectors.
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Toward a Trilogy of Job Displacement, Augmentation, and Creation.
Over the past decade, analyses have tended to emphasize either workforce substitution or efficiency gains and new types of work resulting from AI implementation. According to a more balanced approach, it is suggested that AI has at least three effects on employment: displacement, augmentation, and creation. Regarding the latter point, one employer in two worldwide expects AI to drive employment growth over the next five years.
Given that generative AI could have significant repercussions across a wide range of work-related tasks, it will affect employment demand. The augmentation potential is substantially greater than the automation potential: according to International Labour Organization (ILO) research, it is estimated that while 13% of jobs worldwide could be stimulated by AI, only 2.3% could be entirely automated at present.
Generally, technology can be a crucial tool for social progress if properly directed: AI can help provide solutions to fundamental social and work problems. Thus, there is no need to make a binary choice between using AI or not; this is a false dichotomy. In 2025, we move forward—and we do so with AI.