A new study by Microsoft has found that translators, journalists, historians, data scientists, and customer service representatives are among the jobs most vulnerable to being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI).
The research, titled “Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI”, was published on arXiv.org but has not yet undergone peer review.
Researchers analyzed nine months of user interactions with Bing Copilot in 2024, focusing on work-related tasks. They then calculated an “AI applicability score” to measure which occupations are most likely to be impacted.
The findings show that knowledge work and communication-heavy roles are at the greatest risk, especially jobs involving information gathering, summarizing, and drafting, areas where AI performed well.
Occupations with the highest scores included interpreters, journalists, political scientists, web developers, mathematicians, sales representatives, geographers, hostesses, personal finance advisors, and economics teachers.
“These professions, largely white-collar knowledge work, face significant overlap with tasks AI can perform,” the researchers wrote.
However, they cautioned against assuming full automation is inevitable: “This would be a mistake, as our data does not include the downstream business impacts of new technology, which are hard to predict and often counterintuitive.”
By contrast, jobs with the lowest applicability scores were those requiring physical labor, direct human interaction, or operating machinery.
These included nursing assistants, ship engineers, embalmers, oral surgeons, massage therapists, maids, tire builders, roofers, and floor sanders.
The study concludes that AI’s impact will not be uniform: knowledge-based jobs are more at risk of disruption, while labor-intensive and human-centered roles are relatively safe.
