AI could impact up to 80 percent of jobs in the US and EU, show studies
The advent of the new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) could impact a large majority of jobs, multiple studies have now found. These studies were conducted by OpenAI, one of the promoters of this new technology as well as investment banker and financial services company, Goldman Sachs.
Generative AI such as ChatGPT took the world by storm when it was launched in November last year. What has been even more remarkable, however, is how rapidly the technology behind it is being incorporated into everyday products. Companies like Microsoft are aggressively pushing AI-enabled features in their existing products, while startups like Midjourney are revolutionizing fields in a matter of months.
All these advancements are definitely expected to change the way we work and studies undertaken by Open AI and Goldman Sachs are an attempt to understand what the future of work will look like.
What do the studies say?
OpenAI conducted its study in partnership with Open Research, an international engineering company, and the University of Pennsylvania to study the impact of AI on the U.S. workforce. The research was published on a pre-print server and found that implementation of large language models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) could affect as much as 80 percent of the workforce.
The researchers themselves used AI tools for the research and found that using similar tools in various sectors could impact 15 percent of all work tasks in the U.S. Probing a little deeper, showed that as much as 20 percent of workers could see at least 50 percent of their work tasks impacted by AI, while 80 percent of the workforce could see at least 10 percent of their work being impacted by the technology.
The researchers found that with access to AI tools, work could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality. However, looking for potential economic impact, the researchers did not distinguish whether the application of technology augmented labor or displaced them.

Occupations such as mathematicians, journalists, authors, web and digital interface designers, and tax preparers are those that are highly exposed, meaning AI could significantly cut down work task time in jobs, the study said.
The study by Goldman Sachs studied the impact of AI automation in the U.S. and the European Union and estimates that it could impact as many as two-thirds of the current jobs.
The study estimates that 46 percent of administrative jobs and 44 percent of legal jobs could be substituted by AI but those that were physically intensive were at least exposed to the new technology.
From a financial point of view, AI could bring in improved productivity, new job opportunities as well as savings from lower labor costs which could raise the annual global GDP by seven percent over the next 10 years.
The question is whether we will use this wave of technology to improve our work life or just profits for large corporations.