The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report is the largest employer-survey-based analysis of AI's effect on the labour market, drawing on data from more than 1,000 companies across 55 economies. Its headline finding is that AI will displace 92 million jobs globally while creating 170 million new ones, for a net gain of 78 million jobs. That figure sounds reassuring until you examine the caveat the WEF itself emphasises: the transitions will be deeply uneven. The workers most affected by displacement are not the workers best positioned to fill the new roles, and the geographic and income distribution of the impact varies substantially. The report also found that 41% of employers plan AI-driven headcount reductions in at least some functions within five years, a figure that is consistent with documented employer behaviour already underway in 2026.
What the research says
92M
jobs displaced by 2030
WEF Future of Jobs 2025
170M
new roles created by 2030
WEF Future of Jobs 2025
41%
of employers plan AI-driven headcount reductions
WEF 2025
55K
job cuts explicitly attributed to AI in 2024
Challenger, Gray and Christmas
The WEF's Future of Jobs 2025 report gathered data from over 1,000 employers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. The 92 million figure represents projected global job displacement across those industries by 2030. It is an employer-survey-based projection, meaning it reflects planned changes rather than an econometric model. The 170 million new jobs figure comes from the same methodology: employers reporting roles they expect to create as AI expands their operational capacity.
Not necessarily. Net positive global job creation does not mean the displaced workers are the same people who fill the new roles. The WEF explicitly notes that transitions will be uneven by region, by income level, and by education level. Workers in developing economies doing routine cognitive work face greater risk with fewer transition pathways than workers in high-income economies with access to reskilling resources. The net figure is an aggregate that masks significant individual-level risk.
The fastest-growing roles in the WEF's projections are: AI and machine learning specialists, data analysts and scientists, renewable energy engineers, sustainability specialists, and care economy roles including nursing and social work. Notably, these new roles require very different skills from those in the displaced categories. That skills mismatch is the central challenge the WEF identifies: displaced clerical workers do not automatically have the technical skills for the growing categories.
The report identifies clerical and secretarial roles (including data entry clerks and administrative assistants), bank tellers and postal workers, cashiers, and accounting and bookkeeping clerks as the categories with the largest projected absolute declines. These roles share the characteristic of being highly routine and information-based, with tasks that current AI systems can handle at comparable quality to human workers.
The WEF found that 41% of employers plan to reduce headcount in some functions due to AI within five years. For individuals, this means that even in organisations that are not broadly restructuring, specific functions may be significantly affected. The pattern is typically function-level reduction rather than organisation-wide layoffs: a company may grow its AI team by 20% while reducing its customer service team by 40%. Workers in the affected functions need to assess their exposure regardless of whether their employer as a whole is growing.
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