If artificial intelligence disrupts the job market, which workers will be most vulnerable?
The obvious answer, and the one that has dominated public debate over AI job loss in recent months, is that the workers most at risk are programmers, software engineers and other tech industry employees. They have borne the brunt of the mass layoffs by Meta, Block and other Silicon Valley companies. Their skills are the ones that AI systems have mastered first.
But many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers: customer service representatives, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs.
Some of these workers have college degrees. Many do not. They are spread across the country and throughout the economy, working in every industry, in big cities and small towns, at major corporations and mom-and-pop businesses. They are disproportionately – overwhelmingly, in some occupations – women.
These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one – much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalisation and automation wiped many of them away.
“I worry that AI will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialisation was to high-school-educated men,” said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organisation focused on AI’s impact on workers and the economy.
For now, such an outcome is a fear, not a forecast. Despite high-profile layoffs in tech and finance, there is little firm evidence that AI has hurt the labour market as a whole.
Economists have become increasingly convinced that disruptions are likely, but they say it is too early to know where or how widespread they will be. They remain broadly sceptical of claims that the technology will lead to mass unemployment in the near future. Some AI industry leaders have walked back such predictions in recent weeks.
But given the extraordinary pace at which companies are adopting AI – and at which the technology is improving – economists say policymakers need to consider the potential effects on the labour market. And they say they are concerned that the public debate has focused too much on software engineers and a relative handful of other high-status careers – lawyers, consultants, economists – rather than the workers who could be most vulnerable.
Back-office jobs deserve more attention in the AI discussion, said Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings who has studied the impact of the technology.
“These are the kind of anchor jobs for families and households,” he said. “We really need to keep our eye on what is occurring across the entire labour market and in all of these occupations.”
Good jobs at risk
Software engineers have dominated the public discussion of AI partly because they have been the first to adopt it in their work. Measures of AI exposure that are based on how people are using the technology, therefore, inevitably show programming jobs as among the most at risk.
But as the technology spreads through the economy, a broader set of roles could be affected. For companies, the promise of AI is that it will save them money, and back-office jobs are an obvious place to look to cut costs.
“If you think about the back office, that’s not the main function of the company, so they might think of it as a cost centre,” said Jung Ho Choi, an accounting professor at Stanford University.
Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures of AI exposure based on the makeup of the total workforce, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and front-line roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list.
“The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks,” said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper’s authors. “They’re not computer scientists or data scientists at all.”
Widely cited measures of AI exposure, she added, “give the wrong impression” about who will be most affected – and, in particular, tend to understate the impact on people without college degrees, older workers and people of colour.
Kinder gave the example of medical records specialists, a job that pays about US$50,000 (RM202,500) a year and typically doesn’t require a college degree. More than 90% of the jobs are held by women, many of whom work from home, making it an ideal role for many mothers with young children.
Other examples include billing and payroll clerks, and customer service representatives – jobs that pay at or near middle-class salaries without requiring a college degree. All of them are dominated by women. And all of them are, by various measures, vulnerable to substitution with AI.
“My worry is that the lesson from deindustrialisation is that many of these women will be able to get another job, but it might be a much worse job,” Kinder said. “It might be more precarious.”
Fewer rungs on the ladder
Back-office workers are hardly strangers to technological disruptions. Word processors displaced typists; spreadsheet programs and accounting software displaced bookkeepers; online booking sites displaced travel agents.
Those changes came gradually, however, giving workers a chance to adapt. Women, in particular, responded to the disappearance of many secretarial jobs in the 1980s and 1990s by attending college in record numbers, opening pathways to better-paying careers.
“College-educated women are the ones who came out on top from this,” said Eliza Forsythe, an economist at the University of Illinois who has studied earlier waves of white-collar automation. “They’re the ones who experienced the employment gains without the wage declines. Everyone else are the ones who didn’t do as well from this technology.”
The risk with AI is that it will move too quickly for workers to adapt – and that, this time, a college degree won’t protect against displacement. Indeed, many of the jobs that women transitioned to during the computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, like accounting and human resources, are now vulnerable to AI displacement.
Forsythe said AI was also likely to create new jobs, as did earlier technological revolutions. And it is too soon to know to what degree AI will displace workers rather than make them more productive, potentially allowing them to earn more.
“I would be cautious about just focusing on what are we losing as opposed to what are we going to gain on the other side,” Forsythe said.
Even if AI doesn’t destroy jobs, there could be lasting consequences for workers caught in the transition. Muro, the Brookings economist, has studied how AI threatens jobs that have traditionally served as “gateways” between low-paying, entry-level work and more sustainable careers.
Someone who starts as a receptionist, for example, might move into a customer service job that pays only modestly better but offers a chance to move into a much better job in human resources or even management. If AI eliminates that middle step, it could be harder for workers to move up the career ladder, said Justin Heck, a co-author on a recent article with Muro.
“What happens if we’re no longer building those skills on the job? Where is there available to move up?” Heck asked. “What are the ramifications three years from now, when workers remain stranded in low-wage work, and employers are struggling to fill high-wage roles because we’ve carved out the middle?” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
