For Some Americans, AI Is Coming to Take Your Job, and You Can’t Stop It

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 10, 9:15AM EST

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Artificial intelligence has become a threat to jobs across many industries.
Reports indicate that millions of Americans will lose their jobs to automation in the next decade.

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For Some Americans, AI Is Coming to Take Your Job, and You Can’t Stop It — © iLexx / Getty Images

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a threat to jobs across many industries. If you work in one of them, you’re not going to stop it. That is the conclusion of a huge report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The WEF’s annual report is titled the Future of Jobs, and the new version is for 2025. The study looks at perceptions of 1,000 employers who represent 14 million workers in 55 industries.

Who Will Be Out of Work?

Jobs that require modest skills will be the first to go.

Which jobs will be hit the hardest? Postal workers, executive secretaries, and payroll clerks. The effects will be across the board among people with jobs that require modest skills. On the other side of the coin are people who can design the AI tools that will replace these workers. “Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market — driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,” the researchers wrote.

These trends will hit some of the largest employers in America, if the yardstick in the report is correct. People who work at Walmart, which is America’s largest employer, are at risk. This is particularly true of people who work at lower levels in its over 4,600 stores. It also includes store workers at McDonald’s, which is also among America’s largest employers. The U.S. Postal Service employs over 600,000 people.

How broad are the effects of AI over the next decade? Forty-one percent of companies plan to “downsize” by using AI between 2025 and 2030, the WEF forecasts.

The challenge for people who are not technologists is whether they can be “upscaled” to the extent that their skills become valuable and technical. Some workers simply do not have to background to do that.

The Jobs Apocalypse

Forty million Americans out of work.

The Guardian reports that Americans face a jobs apocalypse that could rob 40 million people in the United States of their livelihoods. The total employee base in the United States is just over 160 million people. That puts 25% of all American workers at risk of being unemployed because of AI within the next decade. If any additional proof is necessary, the study of employment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at occupations between 2023 and 2033 and shows a pattern similar to the one from the WEF.

Millions of Americans will lose their jobs to automation in the next decade. If you work in one of the affected industries, get ready.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.