AI Changes the Work Before It Changes the Org Chart

Company discussions about AI often focus on which jobs will disappear. Recent data shows that what changes first are the tasks and skills inside each job.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on data from over 1,000 companies in 22 industries and 55 economies, expects job disruption equal to 22% of jobs by 2030: 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced, a net increase of 78 million. Nearly 40% of the skills required on the job are set to change.¹

Employer plans: upskilling and reducing at once

The same report notes that 77% of employers plan to upskill their workers, 41% plan to reduce their workforce as AI automates certain tasks, and half plan to reorient their business.¹ These plans look contradictory, but they are easier to understand when viewed task by task rather than job by job.

Who feels it first

Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2025), studied 5,172 customer-support agents given a generative AI assistant in stages. Productivity, measured as issues resolved per hour, rose 15% on average. Less experienced and lower-skilled workers improved in both speed and quality, while the most experienced saw small gains in speed and small declines in quality.²

In this study, the largest gains went to the least experienced workers. Meanwhile Deloitte finds only 6% of leaders say they are making progress designing human-AI interactions.³

WEF data comes from a global employer survey. The QJE study was done in one software firm's customer-support function, so effect sizes may differ in other work.