Microsoft Study Reveals Jobs Most Vulnerable to AI Disruption

New research shows the 10 jobs most at risk of being replaced by AI -- and 10 jobs that are safe

New research shows which jobs are likely to be most impacted by artificial intelligence, and the results may surprise you. A new report from Microsoft, titled, "Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI," takes a look at how workers in different fields adopt AI and how it will impact their jobs. Researchers analyzed what activities people used AI for in their jobs, how successful the results were, and what jobs the users had to come up with an "AI applicability score." The tech giant collected the data from 200,000 anonymous and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system, from January to September 2024.

Microsoft Study Identifies Jobs Vulnerable to AI. Is Your Position Secure?

Trina Paul is a Breaking News and Personal Finance Writer at Investopedia, covering topics like retirement, consumer debt, and retail investing. She focuses on making complex financial topics accessible and interesting to everyday readers, explaining everything from Social Security to the intricacies of 401(k)s. If you're a translator, historian, writer, data scientist, or customer service representative, your job could be ripe for being ). That's according to a new, not-yet-reviewed research from Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), which identified 40 occupations with tasks most likely to be replaced by AI. Their findings suggest that knowledge work and communication-heavy jobs are the most vulnerable to AI disruption, while roles requiring physical labor or direct human interaction are projected to stay relatively safe. To determine AI's potential impact, Microsoft researchers analyzed user interactions with Bing Copilot over nine months in 2024. They narrowed down the conversations to those related to work tasks and then measured how successful AI was at completing those tasks. They then combined that data with information on which occupations include those work tasks, calculating an "AI applicability score," which measures how likely a job is to be impacted by AI. Roles with the highest scores tended to include tasks such as information gathering, summarizing, or drafting -- all activities where AI performs well. These jobs included the following: The roles with the highest applicability scores tended to be knowledge work or . The researchers found that many Copilot users used the AI for gathering information and writing tasks, at which it rated well. "It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss, and that occupations with activities AI assists with will be augmented and raise wages," the researchers wrote. "This would be a mistake, as our data does not include the downstream business impacts of new technology, which are very hard to predict and often counterintuitive." On the flip side, jobs with the lowest applicability scores involved physical labor, working directly with people, or operating machinery. These jobs included the following: The way that AI impacts the workforce remains uncertain, even as investors pour billions of dollars into companies that promise to revolutionize the way people work. While certain jobs have many work activities, like doing research and writing, that can be automated or augmented by AI, the researchers did not find any occupations that AI could fully replace. "Our data do not indicate that AI is performing all of the work activities of any one occupation," the researchers wrote. For now, AI appears more likely to assist or augment certain job tasks rather than outright replace entire professions. But as the technology evolves, adaptation might be key for both employers and workers navigating this new era of work.